Wednesday, March 02, 2005

The Greatest Country of the World?

Last week sometime, I was watching Derek O'Brian's quiz show on some channel. The participants were young kids from India, China and Korea. After all of them introduced themselves, Derek came back to the Indian kids' desk, and called upon the other kids. What he said exactly I don't quite recollect, but the gist of it was that he was calling the other kids to the desk of the greatest country in the world.

I found this quite arrogant. Come on Derek, those were just kids of probably 8-10 years of age and do you want to enforce your feelings that India is greatest country of them all, on these kids? I doubt what prompted him to do so. Clearly if he had been quizzing older people, he would not have pulled the stunt, would he? China and Korea are two beautiful countries themselves and he had no business belittling them. I wonder what would his reaction might have been, if one of the Chinese or Korean kid had argued with him on this.

Call me preachy, but like Mohan Bhargava (Swades hero, in case you have forgotten), even I don't think we are the greatest country in the world. And with such people having an illusion at large, we have light years to go.

signing off,

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