bangalore, india

India now has among the world’s largest constellations of remote-sensing satellites. They are sophisticated enough to distinguish healthy coconuts from diseased ones in this region’s thick palms. They can also zero in on deadly mosquitoes lurking in a patch of jungle (Washington Post).

At first the quote innocuous. It’s fairly evident that the article is discussing India’s growing national space program. Read it again; not in the context of its factual content, but instead of its descriptions. There are a couple assumptions those few sentences make — and that’s what we will be talking about today.

1. Indians would use remote-sensing satellites to “distinguish healthy coconuts from diseased ones.”
2. Indian would, again, use remote-sensing satellites to find mosquitoes “lurking in a patch of jungle.”

Oh, Washington Post, you have hit it on the head!  Because there are “exotic” coconut trees in India, coconuts must be an Indian’s primary source of nutrition. With over 1 billion people, the Indian government would spends hundreds of thousands of dollars spotting diseased coconuts for a single farmer in a minuscule region of a country that is over 3 million square miles in size. Yes, you have got that right! I only wonder why I didn’t think about that before. It sounds like an excellent use of resources and technology.

Additionally, this insightful article points out that India’s great technology can spot mosquitoes in patches of jungle. For one, we have now solved India’s malaria problem and realized that most of India is a backwards, rural nation living in a jungle. I am so glad that in two sentences the article only cemented common stereotypes about India.

I can agree that parts of India are very rural and quite traditional. On the same note, categorizing the whole country into that column is unacceptable. Cities like Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi are all teeming metropolises, epicenters of Indian production.  With a growing middle class, more and more students are attending college and creating a better, healthier lifestyle for themselves. That isn’t to say that diseases are not easily spread in India – they are. But mosquitoes are not the only problems the Indian population faces.

Maybe I have been reading too much Racialicious lately, but that blog has challenged me to uncover some of the prejudices and unintentional traps we fall into. The Washington Post article, in fact, is pretty well-written — I was going to use it on a post about the Indian space program, actually — but it falls prey to a huge writer’s fumble.  It exoticizes a culture and makes it seem magical or quaint. (The Indian culture, however, is pretty fabulous.) Unfortunately, this exocitization occurs because we as Americans don’t know enough about other cultures to actively challenge these written perceptions. This is why it is more important than ever to watch our words.