Foreign Approval

It was only when Amartya Sen received 1998 Nobel Prize in Stolkholm for his work in the field of economics that we discovered the genius inside him.

When Bill Gates makes a statement about IITs, it dominates the headlines of The Times of India while a similar Narayan Murthy or Vinod Khosla comment evaporates away unnoticed.

Indian government waited for ICC's nomination of Sachin Tendulkar as the player of the year to honour this champion with Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna award, given the fact that India has hardly produced any world beater in a game other than cricket.

Satyajit Ray received Padma Vibhushan only after he was rewarded with all the prestigious worldwide film awards, right from Golden Berlin Bear in Germany to Golden Palm in Cannes.

All these above mentioned facts connote that we always need a foreign stamp to corroborate whether a particular person or institution or even an event is worth praising or not. It appears that we have lost faith in our ability to rationalize the immensity associated with something or someone. We constitute one fifth of the world in terms of the number of human bodies but these bodies mean nothing more than lifeless, dead creatures if we can't use our ability to express the greatness of our people and the graveness of our events. We appreciate a B grade English movie but hesitate to call a genuinely good Bollywood movie good. This diffidence is a consequence of our blind faith in alien products and people, and our inability to define eminence. We may be producing the best hands for all walks of life but at the end of the day, it is self-recognition that can firm our feet during a storm.