Al Akhbar, p.3, (28/4/2007)
Do you think I am Indian?
By: Diaa Abu Kalila
"Do you think I am an Indian and riding an elephant?" This is a statement uttered by young men who denunciate those who ridicule them and their abilities. In fact we are not doing Indians justice by using this saying. If we compare poor Indians who ride elephants and our rich young men who ride expensive cars and go to discos, we will find a big difference between them.
India is a poor country with limited resources compared to its one billion population. The country was divided during the past century due to the foreign colonialism.
India started its renaissance through getting rid of the British occupation by using the simplest means of political and economic resistance. Gandhi's goat helped him to boycott British products and to achieve self-sufficiency. This method succeeded in driving the British away from India. They left India with no resources and with lots of sectarian seditions.
In less than half a century, India managed to overcome this situation and to come to the forefront of developing countries and even join the nuclear club and make a breakthrough in the technological field. Indian young men managed to excel in the field of information technology. There is hardly a global company that does not have an Indian among its staff. In Egypt, young Indians are in charge of installing the latest computer software in the Egyptian banks and financial institutions.
However, if we have a look at our young men we will find out that they are just interested in standing on the corners of the streets bragging about their love affairs and blindly copying the western fashions. When they sit in front of the computers, all they care about is chatting and downloading cell phone tones.
This is a simple comparison between Indians who ride elephants and our young men who ride Ferraris and who do not want to use their minds instead of mocking Indians.
Dr. Samia Khedr, professor of sociology at Ein Shams University, says that this idea about Indians is acquired because of scenes of Indians riding elephants and the exaggerations found in Indian movies. This is the image young men get about Indians through the TV.
She believes that the media is mainly responsible for this image. The Indian movies broadcast on the Egyptian TV are old ones and do not express the progress of the Indian movie industry that led India to get a lot of world awards in this field. They do not even show the progress of India in the field of information technology and in the nuclear field.
She confirmed that a lot of Egyptian young men know about this Indian progress and do not ridicule Indians. Yet, there is another category of the Egyptian young men who do not realize what is going on around them and utter such passive phrases. At the end, this view about India would radically change during the coming period, she said.
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