Bella writes: > I second the excerpts written by Mario Goveia and Nascy Caldeira on > this forum.
Date: Wed, 25 Feb 2009 02:43:58 -0800 (PST) From: Samir Kelekar <[email protected]> Talk from the kinds of Nascy doesnt cost anything, Bella. It doesnt cost anything sitting in Australia to advice Indians to deal with slums. Nasci could perhaps show the way by coming to India and walking the talk! Mario observes: This notion that Indian expatriates have no business commenting or opining on conditions in our homeland cannot be allowed to stand unchallenged. We have just as much right as anyone else who lives in India, especially in a community forum like this one, developed precisely to allow us to speak our minds and express our opinions. Every one of us know that we do not face what you face on a daily basis, and most of us respect this and stand ready to be constructive and supportive in any way we can. Most of us have seen what works in other countries and wonder why some of these attitudes and methods and practices cannot be replicated in India. However, having said that, isn't waiting around for the government or someone else to "walk the talk", part of the problem in India? We expatriates have solved our own problems our way, making life decisions that we felt were in the best interests of ourselves and our families. Thousands of us would probably have never left had it not been for India's disastrous 50-year experiment with socialism. I am almost certainly one of them. Proof of this is the recent slowing down of the so-called brain drain, and reversal in some cases, even before the current economic slowdown. Billions of dollars flow from us in aggregate to India, which is precisely why the Indian government came up with a unique device to encourage us to continue called the Overseas Citizen of India. Many of us have been instrumental in raising the image of India and Indians from the early stereotypes of coexisting with snakes and tigers and elephants and monkeys and other Rudyard Kipling imagery. The new Indian stereotype in the west is one of professionals and scientists and academics and business people who are second to none in intelligence and work ethic, even in the most competitive society the world has ever known, the USA, where the old so-called "Protestant work ethic" has long been replaced by the "immigrant work ethic". That is a lot more than just talk. The fact remains that there are 65 million underutilized Indian slum dwellers, highly creative in how they survive, living in the most primitive and degrading conditions, often juxtaposed with conspicuous wealth and affluence, especially in the urban centers, while people who could do more to employ them and provide them with basic social services like Amitabh Bachchan and Aamir Khan, prefer to sit around and suck on sour grapes, and others resent the notion that more can and must be done by other Indians.
