Suni who?????

Sunita Williams is back on earth – thank god! Her achievement is definitely a great one and good for her!! However, the obsession that we Indians have shown about her being of “Indian origin” is borders on being the most ridiculous. Let’s face it…. Sunita Williams is NOT Indian but an American.

Last few years, with the burgeoning number of news channels and news outlets, we are increasingly seeing a flood of non-sensical reports passed on as news. Along has come the race to report about achievements about people with even remote Indian connection. Most times, their achievements have nothing to do with India, these individuals do not care one bit about India nor do they contribute in any way to India’s betterment. Why then do the Indian media have such an obsessive compulsive disorder of covering these people of so-called “Indian” origin?

When Suni (that’s the name she goes by – the fact that she does not even use her “Indian” name but chooses a more palatable American version shows how “Indian” she is) was in space, we were endlessly served with news about how her days were at the International Space Station, how she missed her pet Jack Russell Terrier named Gorby, how she ran the Boston Marathon in space, how entire India was worried when her return to earth was delayed and so on. The coverage was nauseating at best and also about the most trivial happenings. There was a similar slew of coverage a few years ago when another PIO - one Bobby Jindal ran for the office of the Governor of US state of Louisiana and lost and then ran and won the race for the US House of Representatives.

Why is it that we Indians have a desire to be associated with achievements of people who are Indians remotely at best but associated with “the White and Western world” while not giving enough recognition to our won – people who struggle to beat all the odds and do real work for the progress of the Indian society? Should we not celebrate more of what is really our own?

I guess it all begins at the top. When even our senior most politicians and leaders would gladly be water carriers for Mrs. Sonia Gandhi and claim her to be worthy of a position no one else ought to desire, why are we surprised that generally speaking, most of us still tend to view anything associated with white skin to be qualitatively better?