In all the years of living abroad, I’ve rarely met a person who has the good impression of India. The first sentence that pops out of their mouth is : Oh! your country is so poor, so dirty, so over populated , people there are so corrupt...blah blah.This makes me so angry. I immediately retort and ask them if they have heard of Indian Hospitality and other great things that my country offers---The Taj Mahal, The Qutab Minar, The Red Fort, all the Palaces in Rajasthan, The natural beauty of Kerala...and the same people say:Yeah !! that too!!
Why is it that inspite of all the good things our country has to offer, foreigners are aware of the only the over population, corruption and poverty??Are we responsible in some way for the negative image others have of our motherland ??
Most of us watched The Amazing Race # 5 quite keenly---after all, it is one of the most popular Reality TV shows. Here the contestants race around the world for One Million US Dollars. The race gets flagged off in some US city and after circling the world once, the contestants come to another US city in the final episode.
In each country the teams visit, they are given clues about a certain place in that city, then they have to crack the clue and find the place, complete a task there and move on. Believe me when I tell you that each country the teams went to, they were given clues about the most wonderful place in the whole city---were given a task to perform which was very typical of the place. But it was a different story altogether when the teams arrived in Kolkata. Instead of sending the teams to some/any picturesque location there, they were made to take the local train at peak hour to some God forsaken place called Garia and find a brick factory and their task was to make bricks. Each player was heard commenting about how dirty & poor the country is, how nasty the people are, how lousy the train was etc.etc.
I was very put off by all this----could not have the teams been taken to some other location where they would have had to perform something else?? I wrote a letter to the producers of The Amazing Race regarding this and am still waiting for a reply.
Then about a fortnight ago, they were showing a programme on BANGALORE & the way it has developed in the last few years.Here the CNN reporters and camera crew were given a tour of the city by a group of people from an N.G.O. These fellows took them to the slums of Bangalore and gave them a tour of that place---how people are surviving without the basic necessities of life----running water, proper sanitation and electricity. They tried to convince the CNN reporters that the talk of development was farce and this was the real face of Bangalore. So appalling!!
Nobody talks of how rich our culture is, how beautiful and diverse our country is, the progress India has made in such little time, how our I T Professionals are considered the best worldwide.
The challenges our country faces are enormous but can we solve it by projecting a negative image of our country to outsiders??Is there any country in the world where there are no slums, no poverty, no corruption---but is that the image which is projected?? May be it is time for us to learn a thing or two from them.
I still remember the last time we returning from India after a 20-day vacation. We were at the New Delhi Airport, about to check-in. There was this group of German tourists who were also on their way back to their country. Just before they got into the Airport Building, each of them bend down and kissed the soil --- I was so moved by their gesture that I just walked across and hugged them.