Our students mostly don’t want to be scholars. That’s too nerdy, they feel. And studying core subjects don’t pay much in India. And even if you study say Literature, Culture Studies or Pure Mathematics here and top your university at the Masters Level, then too a bilayat-returned B-grade student gets the plum academic job here. The proverbial colonial hangover prevents us from respecting homegrown scholars. So our moneyed class and generally discontented intellectuals seek out doles ( called scholarships) from various foreign universities and rush there to cram what they easily could have done here only if their greed were checked. The result: Australian racists bashing our poor exiled students.
I am not much surprised at these attacks. Even a cursory glance at colonial studies will show how people of colour have been regularly brutalized by the Whites. They are deplorable but nonetheless a fact of history. It’s bound to occur like the bull-bear cycles of the equity markets, somewhat like Eliade’s myth of eternal return, like Nietzsche’s transvaluation of values. I am sure you have got the hang of it…
Amitava Ghosh says somewhere in The Shadow Lines how we have no right to eat off the fat of developed nations when we never made their houses and streets. Rather we should make our own country developed. That ain’t gonna happen if we have cowards running away from our troubled nation.
Here’s a word of caution: Don’t believe everything the media portrays. There are more positives to being outside India if one is willing to accept the culture of the country they are living in. Trust me, I’m not the only Indian saying so.
Comment by Psych Babbler — June 8, 2009 @ 5:30 am