Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! and almost every other Fortune 500 company in the sates has been built with intellectual contributions from Indians educated in IITs, RECs and other government funded institutions.(Read as Tax Payer money). If you were brought up in India, almost every home cooked meal you had as a child was cooked on subsidized LPG.
This is not an argument on brain drain. Indians are welcome to go and work in any country of their choice. We have enough and more talent from where they came from. Except by family and friends, they will not be missed.
I too have many friends and close family working abroad who I miss dearly. The point is, I might miss them, the country doesn't . We can, as the saying goes, afford to spread the love.
What I do not understand is why a few people of Indian origin living abroad turnaround and say that our system sucks. I concede, socialist ideologies are like capitalist ideologies. They are both imperfect and unfair.
They (the few I refer to above) forget that they are a product of the Indian socialist system. They are welcome to live in New Jersey or Fremont or any place under the star spangled banner and support American occupation and war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Palestine. They can continue to clap for the cause of genocide and disaster capitalism. What irritates me is when they turn around and say that they did not benefit from socialism. They would not be where they are without many of the socialist policies that India has had in the last 60 years.
- They will complain that "Indians" just don't get the concept of "copyright" and "ownership" but they will be transferring and copying Indian classical music in Gigabytes.
- They will claim that Hinduism needs a revival and is threatened by "other" religions while heating their beef burgers in the microwave.
- They will call you a marxist, socialist or naxalite if you point out that they are as much a hypocrite as you are. (They use labels on resident Indians like a receptionist would use post-it notes).
- They complain about the "filth" in India. They readily forget that they pollute 500 times more than the average Indian.
- If you suffer from an identity crisis...deal with it. Don't take it out on me.
- If you suffer from a sense of superiority...look a little more closely and you will realise that it is rooted in your own misplaced feelings of inferiority.
- If you think India is a big heap of problems...don't tell me you want to change things from "outside the system".
Agree with your point of view to a large extent.
ReplyDeleteHowever, here are some exceptions -
When these NRI's go abroad the most common feeling is "why not in my country?"
and i don't think that is necessarily a bad thing.
The question then is what do you do about it? Or more importantly, what are they doing about it? In some cases people shut up because they cannot contribute towards making a change, in some cases they actually leave their high paid jobs and take the plunge, and in some cases they try to leverage existing resources to make an impact albeit remotely.
Please refer the mid path initiatives on -
http://tinyurl.com/yeztntx
if there s a willing mass to contribute then this can be a movement.
on a separate note - Please correct -typo in line 2 of para 2
@Gyanban
ReplyDeleteWe are on the same page.
My reference is to a few people. The overwhelming majority are not a bunch of whiners.
Most people do come up with constructive suggestions - like Firestarter.