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http://desicritics.org/2006/12/29/135237.php
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Satire: How To Write About India?
December 29, 2006
Neelakantan
Or how to be successful/popular/sought after as a journalist/writer/author especially abroad. Here are the rule(s) of thumb when writing about India for a Western audience...
Here's how you go about it.
Your piece has to start well. Therefore you first create, with good vocabulary, a nice paragraph on the social inequities in India. Keywords to be used are caste, poverty, illiteracy. Statistics like 80% of India lives on farms or 50% of India is illiterate or 70% of India does not use soap can be very handy. Other than percentages, use population figures. 4,32, 1235 houses do not have more than 12 volts of electricity for 3 days of the week would make a great sentence. Include a few names like Vidharba, Madurai if you want greater impact other than the usual outskirts of Bangalore or Hyderabad or slums of Mumbai.
If you want to become particularly rabid at this juncture mention child marriage. A comparison with Pakistan and Bangladesh at this juncture would make great reading especially from a literacy rates standpoint or the great strides those two nations have made. If you have to mention China, mention that they are simply a great nation or that they will overtake India in the next 3 minutes. Never, not even once, create an impression that overall India is moving in the right direction.
The second paragraph should be about India's growth in the last few years. Don't forget to add a sentence in the end of this para to denounce the growth. Keep this para as short as possible. Keywords are myth, haves vs have nots, elitist bias. So, a sentence in this paragraph should read, even though India's IT and BPO sector has grown, farmers commit suicides. Do not, repeat, do not make a connection that reforms have never really happened in the farm sector and that it is because reforms have not reached them that this happens. Insist, by repeated assertion, that it is IT and its success at the expense of the farm sector that causes this to happen.
In the third para or thereabouts, compare to death. Example: Compare the life of an educated professional with a gardener and say that the gardener earns about 1/10th of what the professional earns. The other good comparison is the number of hutments outside the balcony of your hotel room or the number of beggars in trains. Wonder aloud why reforms have not reached beggars travelling on trains. In the same trend close your eyes to the number of people cellphones have reached, also close your eyes to how individuals are pulling themselves out of poverty using these very things.
Over the next few paras, whine and whine. Now that you already know how to write, just continue in the same vein. For every one sentence of India's growth, three sentences have to denounce it in the strongest terms. Mention two murders which took place recently in fairly graphic detail.
Somewhere just before the end, mention that India's progress has not benefited anybody. Do not talk about people who have gotten out of poverty thanks to this progress. Try to ignore gardeners who maintain lawns in the IT campuses, also ignore cab drivers who are cab owners today.
Preferably avoid talking to maids and security guards who would not have had a job if it were not for this level of growth. Try not to talk to people who are working hard so that their children are educated and their next generation gets out of poverty.
Also, if you have to mention that the BPO sector attracts fresh graduates, mention that these jobs are bad for their gall bladder at the very least. Ignore the fact that for many graduates, a BPO job is a godsend without which they would be working for peanuts at best or standing at the end of a long line at the employment exchange. Ignore the fact that for many of them, the job is a stepping stone to many other things. Ignore the fact that BPOs treat them with dignity and pays them well.
Ignore the fact that jobs are available for the asking in India at almost all levels. Cooks to caterers to security guards to courier boys to shop assistants to technology architects to structural engineers. Also never once, ask the question to the man on the street - has their life changed for the better over the last 10 years. (Believe me, the answer, except in some very dark corners or leftists, will be a resounding yes.)
Your last paragraph has to sound a warning to all those who read your article. Mention about how people and companies and the government has to take more responsibility for poverty and paint it with a broad brush of "private public partnership to make a significant impact".
And oh, the headline of your article should be sufficiently apocalyptic. "Social inequality threatening India's Economic Stability" would make a great example.
BTW, India really is about contrasts. While not getting carried away by the growth and saying all is well here, let us also not go to the other extreme of saying that the reforms have done nothing and that all is wrong here. Neither will reforms take away inequity all of a sudden nor will inequity take away reforms. Both these arguments miss the wood for the trees (or whatever).<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->