You might notice there is one event that I left out in my list - US Presidential election. It was not intentional. For some reason when I wrote that it just did not even come up in mind. Strange you would think - it is one news that has occupied the press for months - it is an event that has consumed my family for months, my sister being a county co-chairperson for Obama's election committee, it is something that has even appeared in this blog before. Yet, it did not seem that significant enough to stand out in my mind.
Obama is this year's
Person of the year for TIME. When people were campaigning to make him the person of the year just after the election, I was incredulous about the idea. Yes, he came up from obscurity into the position of President Elect. Yes, he is very inspiring. Yes, there is a very human face to all that he does. Sometimes if I read about the progression in his life - or even when I listen to him speak in the first few chapters of "Audacity of Hope" - it seems that he has spent the last few years campaigning from one election to another. His selection as TIME Person of the Year showed that world lacked a person who is able to stir people up emotionally, who is able to get people with different ideas to sit across the table, who is able to generate hope that there can be good will and who makes masses believe that one can hope.
At that time I searched in my mind and in Google for some one else who has been able to generate the kind of passion around the world and who has been the "global" fancy for sometime. I could not find anyone - I intuitively felt that there was an unsung hero somewhere - someone who was really contributing to the well being of the people around him - and it just seemed so wrong that all such unsung heroes would be left out because of a very visible person. In a way that reflects our society now - you need to be able to reach out to a large mass and catch their attention in order to be acknowledged. (As an aside, that explains why we hear more often about
Audrey Hepburn - or
Angelina Jones - as Goodwill Ambassadors).
But then I was also surprised by their choice of Putin.
As a non-U.S. resident I think that Obama is an excellent choice for President. In January you will have a mixed-race President for a mixed-race country. This sounds ideal. But why do so many people speak of a "black" President? The fact that Obama's father was black does not make him black. I wonder how many people in Kenya are celebrating because they now have a white President (because his mother was white). None, I suspect.
David Burdett, YORKSHIRE, ENGLAND
This is something I have wondered about for quite sometime. It is sometimes sad to see just colour as a basis to decide about the person. Obama can hardly be called Black. All his upbringing was not like the upbringing of a person from a completely "Black" family which probably had a homogenous experience regarding how children should be brought up. He had different components contributing to his outlook including an Indonesian upbringing. The only "black" influence as far as I have read comes from the effect on other people due to his colour and the knowledge that part of his heritage is in another continent. In this way he can empathise with the suffering of the black, yet he can also see the effect of the discrimination on a liberal white family too.
For me, as for many others, he is more representative of the world now. He has experienced living in a country different from him home land. He has a mixed heritage. His mother traveled to far of lands and worked in far away lands seeing sufferings of different people of different races and types. He has seen different ways in which people live and as far as I can see he has not judged people based on their particular way of doing things. What he is representative is of a confused youngster who grew up strongly and into an independent person with a mind of his own to do well for less privileged ones and with a desire to make the world a better place without judging negatively. I hope he continues to empathise without judging even in the face of difficult times.
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I notice sometime that people who come in touch with India, even when they love India, judge the way the Indian people are and the way small things happen in the country. Their actions are often based on this judgment. This judgment is quite severe sometimes and dictates their decisions about how things should work. What these people miss out on is that we Indians are all different each in our own way and there is no one way in which you can form conclusions about us. Each of us have different outlook based on what we have experienced and the kind of people we have grown up with around. A person, a country's pulse, is also decided by the different kind of exposure gained.
This also defines our flexibility. If we look at us Indians we have done quite well for ourselves. From a country which is a collection of warring kingdoms united by the cause of "British Quit India", we have managed to stay United quite well and democratically too. We have learned to adjust flexibly to the differences around us. This flexibility of course comes through in the work place as well. Yet, we are a nation willing to learn and look for opportunities to learn. Do not mistake this as a weakness - it might seem to be so in the short term.
61 years after Independence, we have come up to be a strong force. I now hope we really become independent in all sectors and become proud of what we are capable of achieving for our country - whether we are in or out of the country.
For this, I feel we need to learn to define our own actions and our own standards in all that we do and match this to the global quality - this we can do once we have the whole country up to the comparable standard of living - a standard of living that is defined by us. However, this is a topic for another post another time.