Author: Rajeev Srinivasan
Publication: Rediff on Net
Date: December 18, 2003
URL: http://www.rediff.com/news/2003/dec/18rajeev.htm
Sherlock Holmes in one of his pithier
stories remarks on the singular incident of the dog in the night time:
which was that the dog did not bark when a crime was committed. Holmes
concluded that the dog did not bark because it knew the criminal, and therefore
he was able to identify the culprit.
Similarly, the Comrades of the Indian
English media did not ask the most pertinent questions when China launched
its manned space ship. To wit:
At a time that the world media was
full of stories on the technological and scientific progress of China because
of its space launch, why was the Indian English media obsessed with medieval,
obscurantist superstition: that is, the beatification of the Blessed M
Teresa? Doesn't this show how unscientific the Indian English media is?
Why is China spending precious millions
on its space program instead of feeding its starving millions? How many
primary schools could be built and how many of the 150 million unemployed
in hellholes like Daqing (see my earlier column Two strikes) could be rehabilitated
for the price of one manned space mission? Horrors, does this mean the
Chinese mandarins don't care about their people?
Isn't there a 'space divide' in
China? How can the Land of the Pure send one man up into space when it
is unable to send every man up into space? This is why we complain so loudly
about the 'digital divide' in India, right? Or, gulp, does it mean that
divides are tolerated in the Great Helmsman's Homeland of Equality?
I scoured the Indian newspapers
looking for Comrades' comments along these lines, but sad to say, I was
sorely disappointed.
This was the dog in the night time
not barking. Therefore, I am forced to conclude that the Old Left(over)
Comrades in the media had been given explicit instructions by their handlers
and the Xinhua propaganda agency as to what stories they were supposed
to comment on.
Money may have changed hands; but
then, maybe those suffering from extreme ideological rigor mortis may not
even need to be paid. They are conditioned to salivate with Pavlovian reliability.
Surely, if it had been India that
had sent a man into space, they would certainly have whined unendingly
about points 2 and 3 above. India is altogether wisely sticking with unmanned
space missions like the Chandrayana moon mission: it has been shown that
sending a human up is not cost effective.
In fact, the Comrades were, as expected,
silent about the 40th anniversary of the first launch of an Indian rocket,
which was on November 21, 1963. This was a Nike Apache sourced from the
US, and put together in an abandoned church at Thumba, Trivandrum. The
parts were carted on the back of a bicycle, and a memorable photograph
shows Dr Aravamudan and Dr Abdul Kalam in shirtsleeves sitting on the ground
working on the rocket.
I remember the launches that used
to create barium green and phosphorescent orange clouds in the skies over
Trivandrum: they sent up these thundering little rockets every week from
the Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station.
We've come a long way, baby, from
those humble beginnings, to a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle and a Geosynchronous
Satellite Launch Vehicle (in other words: ICBMs) built almost entirely
on indigenous effort. Today, from the Vikram Sarabhai Space Center, the
SLVs go to the Satish Dhavan Space Center at Sriharikota. Amazing these
are not named after Nehru dynasty people, by the way!
The Comrades think nothing much
of it, but India did not have to steal technology as the Chinese routinely
do through industrial espionage: India has the brains.
The Comrades only believe in glorifying
their Promised Land. I was once greatly entertained by couple of Comrades'
pronouncements at a conference on IT in Trivandrum, circa 1999 CE. These
Comrades are considered intellectual giants in Old Left circles, and I
dread to think what their intellectual pygmies are like. Of course, I needn't
wonder, I just need to pick up any English language newspaper.
Chou en Lai, in one of his more
lucid moments, called Jawaharlal Nehru a 'useful idiot.' I cannot think
of a better description of the intellectual pygmies of the Old Left, as
far as the Chinese are concerned.
Here is what Comrade A had to say:
The problem with the Indian education
system is that there is not enough of it under government control! I felt
obliged to point out that no parents stand in line outside government schools
to get their children enrolled as they do for private schools. Why more
government control for education, I asked, haven't you guys (the Marxists
and Nehruvian Stalinists) screwed up the system enough? He didn't have
much of an answer.
Furthermore, you ain't seen nothing
yet, pontificated he. You think India is good at IT? Ha, just you wait
till China enters IT in the next six months to a year. India will be outclassed,
predicted he with palpable glee. Well, four years later, we are still in
much the same situation: India's software industry is world class, China's
is far behind.
There's such huge Foreign Direct
Investment in the computer hardware sector in China that practically all
computers will be made in China sooner or later. Now this may well be true,
but the Comrade had, just ten minutes before this, complained bitterly
about too much FDI coming into India. I began to understand: if India does
something, that is ipso facto bad. But if China does the exact same thing,
it must be, tautologically, a Good Thing.
Comrade B made another dubious point:
There is a terrible digital divide
in India. Many rural and poor children cannot afford to get computer education,
and are therefore being left behind. This is bad, therefore we shouldn't
have computers in any school until every school can afford to have one.
I was blown away by the logic. What
about the 'road divide', the 'transistor radio divide', 'the television
divide', 'the newspaper divide', etc.? After all, didn't these too come
to a select few people first, and then spread to the rest? Why did the
Comrades not ban newspapers or radios or televisions or roads?
And the speakers were big 'brains',
one a Jawaharlal Nehru University professor, the other a vice- chancellor.
No wonder, I thought to myself, that the Old Left is collapsing.
What is the reality behind the Chinese
space launch? They are asserting that they have arrived on the world scene:
precisely the kind of machismo other countries have shown when their economies
started growing. The Japanese and the Koreans used their hosting of the
Olympics as sort of their coming out party. China is doing the same, and
the manned mission is another plea of "Look at me, people!"
The Chinese desperately want to
be taken seriously by white people. They have a severe inferiority complex
regarding whites (and an equally severe racism complex against darker skinned
people such as Indians).
Both complexes are without merit,
as they are not particularly inferior nor superior to anyone. But their
women go under the knife increasingly to get round eyes (by removing the
epicanthic fold) or an enhanced nose because they believe it makes them
look "better", meaning more like a white woman.
There is of course the military
angle: the Chinese are making explicit the fact that they have launchers
that can double as Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. But this has been
known for some time: China has some ten missiles pointed at Los Angeles
and San Francisco. And Americans are certainly aware of the threat, as
a writer from the US Naval Academy points out.
It is also true that China is a
military threat to much of Asia: they have been out there terrorizing people
in Tibet, Taiwan, the Spratly Islands and Mischief Reef.
So the only thing the Chinese have
gained with this absurd launch is some bragging rights. They do believe
in marketing. For instance, with much ado, they built the Great Wall of
China some centuries ago at huge cost. Alas, shortly thereafter, it was
breached by the barbarians it was intended to keep out. So it is a classic
white elephant, much as their manned space launch is, too, wherein they
are recycling what the Soviets and the Americans did about 40 years ago.
There are plenty of other white
elephants in China: all those wonderful skyscrapers in Shanghai that excite
visiting Comrades. The buildings' occupancy rate is abysmal; it does not
make business sense, but it certainly creates a nice facade: China is a
country that believes avidly in Potemkin structures.
The rest of the world has tired
of a "build it and they will come strategy" after getting burned in the
internet meltdown, but the Chinese haven't learnt their lesson. There is
a terrific real estate bubble in China: The Economist Intelligence Unit
reports that real estate investment has grown 22% in 2002, and 34% in January
to July 2003, resulting in massive overcapacity.
The Indian English language media
does not report on all this. They are only interested in running down the
genuine upswing in India's economy, see an example from the very China
friendly The Hindu, November 8th: 'Is the euphoria justified? There is
simply no case for crowing about the Indian Economy in 2003-2004'
Denigrate India, praise China to
the high heavens: this is the unwritten rule. Suppressio veri, suggestio
falsi. Suppressing the truth is equivalent to suggesting falsehood.
Comments are welcome at rajeevs@rediff.co.in
