I did not find anything to disagree with.
But couldn't help wondering how it is relevant, if we take a moment to ponder
on what India's superior diversity has resulted in so far. I won't even go into
the details of the diversity of Indian leadership as represented by Nehru,
Indira Gandhi, Rajiv/Sanjiv Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi, A Kashmiri Pandit and the
Half Parsi-Half Brahmin one.
What did you find interesting? That a subcontinent full of people of myriads of
cultures, languages and histories are all equal as demonstrated by the
diversity of PMs or high govt. officialdom ?
That would be a real streeeetch, wouldn't you think?
---- Dilip/Dil Deka <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> You may not agree with everything in the following article but it makes
> interesting reading.
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> function OAS_AD(pos) { if (OAS_version >= 11 &
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> OAS_NORMAL(pos); }
> OAS_AD('Position1'); var ACE_AR = {Site: '738071', Size:
> '468060'}; Dim adsVB,po adsVB=0 If ScriptEngineMajorVersion >=2
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> adsAX=False set po=CreateObject(aX) adsAX=IsObject(po) If (err) then
> adsAX=False Else adsAX=False End If End Function The writer spent
> considerable amount of time in researching the information. However, the
> article says there was/is a PM from Assam. Who is he? MM Singh?
> =============================================================
>
> From the TOI
>
> US can learn diversity from India
> 10 Feb 2008, 0039 hrs IST,Chidanand Rajghatta,TNN
>
> doweshowbellyad=0;
>
> Be it Obama or Hillary, either way, a Democrat Prez this year will
> truly break the mold (TOI Photo)
>
> For a man who was once dubbed "the best President the United States never
> had," Adlai Stevenson came up with one of the most deliciously ironic quotes
> about the highest office in the United States. "In America anyone can be
> President; that's one of the risks you take," he once said in mock
> self-deprecation. A twice Democratic nominee for the Presidency in the 1950s,
> Stevenson's intellectual vim and sparkling wit won him a legion of admirers,
> but not the ultimate prize in US politics.
>
> At a public meeting during his campaign, Stevenson was once greeted with a
> cry from a man in the audience who said he would get the vote of every
> thinking man in America. "Thank you, but I need a majority," Stevenson
> responded dryly. Mocked by the media and his opponents for wearing a worn-out
> shoe with a hole in it during the campaign, he sardonically said, "Rather a
> hole in the shoe than a hole in head." In 1952, Richard Nixon called him as
> an "egghead," a sobriquet he carried with quiet pride and dignity as he paled
> into the political twilight as the US envoy to UN.
>
> Decades later, the myth that "anyone can be the president of the United
> States" continues to be perpetuated ("That's the problem," the comic George
> Carlin quipped, adding to the make-believe). The truth is, there has been a
> pattern to the US Presidency going back 232 years. You have to be white,
> male, and wealthy to make it to the White House, going by the metronomic
> regularity with which the world's "greatest" democracy has elected 43
> presidents of similar pedigree.
>
> Stevenson, despite being arguably the brightest man to run for presidency
> till Al Gore went for it, would have also fitted the mold. Any other type of
> candidate, until now, would have been in the realm of fiction. Indeed, the
> writer Irving Wallace did fictionalize the scenario in his 1960s book The
> Man, in which Douglass Dilman, a young black politician, is accidentally
> pitched into the Presidency. But more of that, and how it has come to
> near-realisation, a little later.
>
> In contrast to the political monoculture that has given the United States 43
> white, male presidents in 232 years, it is in India, one of the world's
> younger democracies, that the truth of the statement anyone can go on to the
> highest office in the land is being realized all the time. Consider this: in
> only 60 years and with 14 Prime Ministers, India has already elected a
> staggering variety of chief executives - from a Kashmiri Pandit to a Punjabi
> Sikh, India has seen a UP Thakur and Jat, an Andhra Brahmin, a Punjabi
> Khatri, a Karnataka Gowda, and a half-Parsi, half-Brahmin pilot, among others
> at the helm.
>
> It has even elected a widow, a widower, and a bachelor among its 14 PMs (the
> US in contrast, counts only one bachelor among 43 presidents). Counting both
> domicile and birthplace, India's 14 PMs span nine of India's now 28 states -
> Kashmir, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra (Rajiv Gandhi was born
> in Mumbai), Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Assam - including two
> who were born in what is now Pakistan's West Punjab (I K Gujral in Jhelum and
> Manmohan Singh in Gah).
>
> What's more, this dharma of diversity is set to expand wider in the coming
> years with the prospect of a single Dalit woman from UP, a young modernist
> Indian who's half-Italian, and an ultranationalistic Gujarati bachelor among
> others lining up for the highest office in the land. Truly, it is in India
> that anyone can go on to be the Prime Minister.
>
> In contrast, the American political system has seldom departed from the mold
> of electing male White Anglo Saxon Protestants (WASPs) to the aptly-named
> White House. John F Kennedy's election in 1960 was considered a minor
> exception (he was a Catholic), while Bill Clinton is nominally considered by
> some as the "first Black president" because of his empathy for
> African-Americans. But it was not until 1984 that a woman came anywhere near
> presidency (when Geraldine Ferraro was the Democratic vice-presidential
> nominee) and it was not until 2004 that a Jew (Joe Liebermann,
> Democrat-now-turned Republican-leaning Independent) was on the ticket.
>
> Of course, Americans are fed plenty of arresting presidential trivia to
> suggest that a great variety have occupied the White House. The US has
> elected a range of presidents, from one who was completely polio-stricken
> (Franklin Roosevelt) to another who was a fashion model (Gerald Ford) and
> another who was an actor (Ronald Reagan). There have been large presidents
> (at 332 lbs, President Taft once got stuck in a bathtub) and small presidents
> (James Madison was a Shastri-esque 5' 4" and weighed only 100 lbs). There
> have been Presidents who were loquacious (none more than Bill Clinton) and
> Presidents who were taciturn (a woman once bet President Coolidge she could
> get more than two words out of him. "You lose," he responded.)
>
> But in the end, they all responded to the same basic description - White
> Male.
>
> Now, after 232 years, the United States - at least one political half of it -
> has come within sniffing distance of truly breaking the mold. Whether the
> Democrats nominate Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama as their candidate for the
> White House, history will be made, and even greater history (getting to the
> White House itself) attempted. If anything, fact will follow fiction, and
> it's not just by way of Irving Wallace's The Man, a book written in the 1960s
> when the idea of a black president was truly in the realm of the fantastic.
> In recent years, there have been a number of films and TV serials that has
> portrayed black presidents - Chris Rock in Head of State, Morgan Freeman in
> Deep Impact, Tommy Lister in The Fifth Element and a couple of actors in the
> TV series '24'. They have been fewer showing women in the presidential role -
> Meryl Streep is set to play a President in a forthcoming comedy with Robert
> DeNiro playing "First Man."
>
> But if and when it happens in real life, the US would still be behind the
> curve with regard to India in at least one aspect - diversity in high office.
>
>
>
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