India is massively screwed in this craven search for self esteem via others, and the media establishment has a long way to go in displaying any sort of maturity in this matter.

Oh come on! I feel you guys are taking this (praise for Sunita Willeums )too cynically. The US is hegemonic and does have a huge impact on the rest of the world, and b/c of this Indian immigrants to the US will have coverage. So many South-Asian americans feel a huge connection with their respective South Asian countries… Look at us in SM…we are always talking about what happens in India…and when some Indian does something amazing we take notice and discuss it continously!

Look how the Irish felt about Kennedy…his ancestory in the US was much older than most desis, but the Irish so felt that he was their “son”. You go to Angry asian Man, and I remember reading about a Korean-American, who’d done something amazing in the US, and was feted in S.Korea.

Those kids are just really cute…and I don’t think Indians are suffering from inferiority complex with this display of “sunita praise”. It’s so natural and today we have the internet and you can feel a lot closer to what goes on in other parts of the world than before.

In the context of affirmative action, colored woman gets two points compared to the one point that a colored man gets.

This is a mere observation, not a complaint – more power to our brown sisters.

I do agree on a lot of thing you just said, disgusting sycophancy, a need to be accepted and admired by other countries etc etc. But allow me to be a little more optimistic. However, before that let me speculate on the reasons for this. We were screwed over by the English (and thus in our psyche – the white man) for 250 odd years and that definitely had seeped into the collective Indian psyche, that the white man (or everyone else) was better than us – how else would an island of such size rule us so effectively and for so long. Come 1947, what should have happened was that the collective energies of India should have been unleashed. Instead we got mired in the socialist license raj BS and thus in 50 years, all we saw was that nothing Indian does matches to anything imported. Indian things are sub standard. Thus instead of a country which would have started believing in itself and gradually getting over it’s lack of confidence, we became a country which despite doing it’s own thing did not manage do much and so much so we almost became bankrupt in 91. Thus we still have this lower self confidence in our own (good enough) abilities, and everything imported is good. Also, due to little interaction with the outside world we just had a perception of the Brits and Americans and the rest of the world as read in history books etc and thus these countries had become larger than life in the Indian psyche.

However, while this will take time, the new Indian’s confidence is growing. This group of Indians who know they can compete with the world is rapidly growing. Sure the media panders to the masses which are still not out of the license raj days yet but that number is gradually getting converted into the the aggressive believing Indian. Each success we have is driving another and a change in mindset. Plus, over the last few years as more and more Indians venture out and return home, as they work with more people from the outside world, we gradually see the reality more and thus the larger than life images are also being broken. Sure,we still have enough problems in India but the belief that we can solve them is rising. Maybe the media’s obsession of aggrandizing ever Indian success (while sickening) may in the end turn this lame attempt to seek pride into some real pride. But even if not, I feel this is the point where over time we will see less and less of this BS.

So we fall ourselves praying for mata shrimati kalpana, mata shrimati etc etc sunita williams, while..how many died in maoist attacks in India the last week, how many soldiers got killed in kashmir, no prayers for them, right?

India is massively screwed in this craven search for self esteem via others, and the media establishment has a long way to go in displaying any sort of maturity in this matter. They’ll gladly dump on all these lesser mortals for they arent hip and modern y’see.

Heck, a couple months back there was some interview in times of india of some US indian origin lady who had come to india and was in the US army …she promptly told the reporter that she would have never joined the IA as it was beneath her, and voila even that was approvingly printed.

SP, even back in the day, NRIs were feted as the Lords gift to humanity and better than lesser mortals for having made it in Noo Yawk or whichever exotic land they commanded fleets of cars and walked streets of gold. Its just now that with in your face TV and far greater media circus, this fascination for all things imported and abroad is visible in all its shining glory.

Dont get me wrong, theres a lot to be proud of when it comes to PIOs/ NRIs, but this shindig in kowtowing to anyone perceived as important is so entrenched in our nations collective psyche that it disgusts me. From forcing kids to garland some dead politicians bust, to standing in the hot sun for hours (I have) because kissing some politicians ass is noble, to fawning over “chacha nehru” and the assorted coterie of dynastic idiots who ran the country, to falling over ourselves in printing praise for some NRI who left india decades ago and got to some fat cat corporate position…its just plain shameless idiocy.

Having seen it for so long..it just seems to go on and on and on..

One Hindu named Aryabhatta did not. He derived a highly accurate value of the duration of solar day – proposing a model of the earth rotating on its axis. The value was pretty good for over 1,000 years. There are so many cosmological accounts none of which make truth claims. It is wrong to term any one of them as the definitive Hindu cosmological account. But ancient Indian cosmological acounts as a rule (Buddhist/Hindu/Jain) talk of infinite time and space without batting an eyelid. These are not wholly scientific claims (i.e., not derived by the scientific method) and substantially logical, even rhetorical.

Exactly! Thank you for that. I thought this was another great example of bandwagon-jumping. Gosh, it seems like so much of Indian self-esteem is stoked by either things from pre-history (like inventing the zero, Milkha’s almost-bronze) or things barely Indian (like Sunita’s, Mohini’s achievements).

Truly so, this is crazy. So what if one of her folks were Indian, whatever has happened is credit to her and to the opportunities provided to her by by her country. The desi dork media behaves so immaturely sometimes. The same was the situation with Mohini Bhradwaj. It’s ok to report it and maybe have an interview or two but kids holding posters and all this delirium is just crap.