And You Call Us Third World Dumbnuts?

OK, I will start by giving you the reason for this post. Basically we have a guest staying at our place who believes that it is India and the other developing economies' fault that the North American economy is in deep shit. He is American (duh!) (no offence). Now his argument is that countries like India and China are infringing on copyright laws and making boot-legged technological products for cheap that result in the originals not being sold. He claims that all the jobs that have been outsourced to such countries can easily be done in America by Americans and soon that shall happen. All I could say to him was, "How is it their fault that you do not want to give up the luxuries of life while they want to obtain the necessities of life?"

That question was not answered. A major reason for that is that I walked away with disgust in my stride, although the bigger reason was that he would not have been able to answer that question. Not with his closed mentality. The arguments that he put forth are grounded in reality, no doubt, but how can he miss facts like America lending out more money than it had, and America spending more than it had, Americans electing horrible president after horrible president (no Obama's "change" revolution is not very flattering so far) or even the fact that Americans do not possess the ability to distinguish between needs and wants.

Yes, the purpose of this post is to prove that the Americans, who are supposedly one of the most developed nations on the face of this planet, still possess a rudimentary mindset.

To Americans, India is a third world country with little scope of development. They believe that the only jobs India creates are jobs it has "stolen" from Americans. Of course not all Americans possess this thought. The educated Americans are exempted, but then they are greatly outnumbered by the ignoramuses. It is conveniently ignored that India and all other developing nations have had to battle the bias of the WTO, an organisation that seems to be an agent to the pompous asses like the U.S. and Co. It is quite evident that WTO is a whore owned by the developed nations when it has hardly done anything to prevent, and later penalize, the U.S move to protectionism. The basic aim of the WTO is to promote free trade (common sense), well, it forced developing nations (India being a strong example) to shed quotas on imports and exports and allow all products to be freely traded to and from developed countries. This is fine as long as a level playing field is maintained by imposing the same on developed nations, but the trend is then broken as the "rich countries" are permitted to impose high quotas on and in some cases completely block trade of certain commodities in order to promote their own local goods. This was exactly the case with U.S. protectionism.

The same gentleman commented that, "...capitalism is all about taking advantage of the small guy...". He is referring to the developing nations being screwed over by the developed nations. Well, to put it into perspective, what India has done with call centers is take advantage of the U.S and effectively made them the "small guy". How come the definition of capitalism differs from nation to nation? Or is this just American hypocrisy?

To comment on their stupidity, they have patented the medicinal use of herbs and plants like turmeric (now revoked), bitter-gourd, etc. These are things that Indians have been using since times B.C (before Christ). To patent items like these is not just mere stupidity, but also an indication of American ignorance of other cultures. In that case, Indians should obtain legal copyrights for plastic surgeries, cosmetic surgeries, caesarian section births, etc. since Sushruta performed all of these sometime between the 6th and 4th century B.C. He authored the Sushruta Samhita, the book describes over 120 surgical instruments, 300 surgical procedures, classifies human surgery in 8 different categories, descriptions of 1120 illnesses, 700 medicinal plants, a detailed study on anatomy, 64 preparations from mineral sources and 57 preparations from animal sources. Well, let the Indians copyright that under the Trade-Related aspects of Intellectual Property Rights and let them collect a royalty on every operation that is listed in that book.

In 1997 an American company RiceTec. was granted rights to call aromatic rice grown outside of India "basmati". This came after they tried marketing the same rice with names like "kasmati" and "texmati". First of all, why is the U.S. patent office handing out patents for something that originated in India (common sense)!? Anyways I will spare you the pains of reading anymore proof of American ignorance. If, though, you are interested in learning what happened of the patent visit http://www1.american.edu/projects/mandala/TED/basmati.htm

Albert Einstein has said for India, "We owe a lot to the Indians, who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made!" So all I ask for is a little respect. Not only for India, but also for every other developing nation, because today you maybe higher, but tomorrow your fall is inevitable, for in the words of Shakespeare, "...uneasy lies the head on which rests the crown."

this post first appeared on www.kidinwhitecountry.blogspot.com