> I've puzzled over this myself. There has been a fair amount of
> outsourcing of tech writing to India and the stuff I have seen has a lot
> of problems. No idea where "the"s should go, weird syntax, etc.
>
> At the same time, all the folks from India I know personally speak and
> write english beautifully, and my favorite writers in English in the
> last fifty years are from India.
>
I'd like to respond to all the points Chris and Joanna have raised:
1. The Nazi t-shirt guy is, in all likelihood, clueless about the significance of what he is wearing - all he knows is that it is vaguely provocative in some way. The only group of people in India who do admire the Nazis are members of the RSS (www.rss.org), an extreme right-wing Hindu fundamentatlist outfit that likes to call itself a "cultural organization" but is actually the fountainhead of much of the more virulent right-wing politics in India. An important element of their mythology is that they are "Aryans" and hence, at least in principle, admissible to Hitler's party. Much as he might admire Hitler, however, an RSS member wouldn't be caught dead in a Hitler t-shirt. For a brief but illuminating primer on the RSS, see Tapan Basu, P. Datta, S. Sarkar, T. Sarkar & S. Sen 'Khakhi Shorts Saffron Flags', (Tracts for the Times - 1), Orient Longman, 1993.
2. Notwithstanding the above, the idea implicit in Ravi's post that young people in urban India blindly imitate the West is only partly true - the very large number of nuances are impossible to grasp on a cursory glance. If Cockburn was guilty of Occidental "parachute" journalism, Ravi is open to the charge of NRI (non-resident Indian) parachute impressionism.
3. Although the absolute number of Indians familiar with English is large (about 7% of a billion or 70 million people), the quality of English teaching that most of these are subjected to is abysmal. There is a very small number of elite schools across the country whose products can hold their own among the most accomplished of native English speakers. The writers that Joanna admires invariably come from these schools. The tech writers that both Joanna and Chris deplore never do - the products of the elite schools are far too well placed to stoop to the menial task of technical writing.
Hope this explains things.
Sujeet