Monday, May 17, 2010

Globalization of the wrong kind

I was recently reading an article about a scandal in an Indian cricket league (known as IPL) involving corruption and politics at the highest levels. Political corruption is nothing new for India but what shocked me was the moniker this scandal got from the Indian media - "IPL-gate". India has a long and glorious history of corruption in both politics and cricket from which we could have garnered lovely names for this scandal and yet, the media chose to name this scandal the way America names its - by adding the 'gate' suffix! I am still trying to understand this. Is this because creativity sorely lacks in most Indian "creative" fields such as writing and music, as I have lamented before? or is it because Indians find it hard to appreciate anything Indian despite an illustrious history. (I have a theory about it that I'll save for another post.) The horrific Mumbai terrorist attack was called "India's 9/11" by the media. Even more troubling to me because in India dates are written in the dd/mm/yy format so if the journalists were being original they would have at least called it "India's 11/9". The same goes for the Satyam Computers scandal. That was labeled as "India's Enron". Intentional or not, it does seem like a cultural colonization of India is in progress and it is voluntarily being encouraged by Indians. Nothing is good enough, unless it can compare to America.