[lbo-talk] books, india

[ravi]

On Nov 30, 2007, at 7:11 AM, bitch at pulpculture.org wrote:
>
> on a somewhat related note, at work, my boss, who's Indian, was  
> saying how
> much she liked Thomas Friedman. I kind of stepped in it when I said  
> that I
> didn't like him and particularly didn't care for his subtext which is
> something like, "Omigod! India is going to become a Great Power and  
> the
> u.s. will end up being an also ran like the British Empire. Omigod!  
> Omigod!
> Omigod! We must stop this!" I mean, she wasn't angry with me, but I  
> did
> that thing you can do as a lefty and say something that's common  
> thinking
> to us that turns out not to be very common to most folks. It makes  
> people
> feel like dupes. In this case, exposing that subtext in Friedman  
> reveals
> that his compliments about India aren't really compliments at all  
> and it
> can make you feel duped if you'd once thought they were.
>

I think its more than that... upwardly mobile ahistorical(*) young  
Indians believed in the Friedman story before it was written -- he  
serves more to document (and only in that sense validate) their sense  
of accomplishment. I wrote once of the amusing experience of a  
conversation with a 24 year old on a long flight to India. The young  
chap was brimming with confidence as he talked about his IT job and  
his plans of rising to the top interspersed with details of his  
upcoming wedding and honeymoon to some Pacific island. Without irony  
he spoke about how my parents' and grandparents' generations were  
weak, cowardly, etc (he was not repeating the old bit about the  
stoicism of Hinduism but offering a more specific critique based on  
psychology and politics). If there is any historical input at all ((*)  
above) it is the urgency to shrug away the history.

You carry the burden of being a Westerner (which is how you would be  
perceived, more than as a member of the nebulous "leftist") and your  
criticism would be seen not as a criticism of Friedman'ish nonsense  
that is a disservice to India(ns), but as a critique of the wonderful  
Indian neo-lib programme in much the same vein as "foreigners are  
stealing my job".

Also, Friedman has struck a symbiotic relationship with the emerging  
meritocracy. Infosys, the epitome of the Indian IT revolution, runs  
slogans such as "Win in the flat world" and "So what makes you a flat  
world company".

Infosys also hires some of the smartest people in India. And Friedman  
successfully pimps his paradigms to this food chain that would rather  
identify sophistication with success (in American anti-intellectual  
fashion ;-)) than with the fruitless pursuit of mystical philosophies.

Sujeet will probably agree ;-) that you should listen with a bit of  
care to self-selected non-representative segments of the population...  
in an earlier post you mentioned (IIRC) that one of your young Indian  
male friends talked about the need to be fair-skinned when it comes to  
finding a mate, especially more so for men. If indeed I have recalled  
that correctly, that is quite the opposite of the truth -- the  
preference of lightness of skin colour is much more of a burden that  
girls/women face than boys/men do.

	--ravi