Rajpal's Column

26th March 2000

Bill Clinton and Uncle Sam in India

By Rajpal Abeynayake

Reuters and other flagbearers of Western notions of reportage have not changed by a long shot. Editors at TIME have overdone themselves with a piece meant to herald the Indian trip of American President Bill Clinton.

But this nudity thing by Reuters, incidentally, takes the cake. The story goes on to say that "America , a puritanical place, is more comfortable about nudity than Brazil is."

It's interesting that America, the world's chief producer of adult pornography, is called a puritanical place, though. Even among the strict Southern Baptists, there are serial adulterers, as Bill Clinton demonstrated to the world so adroitly.

But, Brazil, according to what Reuters infer, is the less puritanical place anyway! The French for instance have always worn their collective promiscuity on their sleeves, as the Mitterend episode showed.

Even there, the American media (there is no other worldwide media) expressed shock over the fact that Mitterand's funeral was attended both by his wife and his mistress.

In this late age, it is still with some sense of bemusement that we in cultures outside of the great United States ( where it is all supposed to happen ) watch the naiveté of reporters of the world's major news organisations. Condescension and being patronizing are all in a way not the chief hallmark of these news reporters. Their chief attribute is that they are eager to please. So eager to please that they are cloying and unctuous.

But beneath this cloying mode is the undertone that all other countries are necessarily culturally less-good. Alternately, the reporting is constantly America-centered, such as the story about nudity which compares Brazilian attitudes towards nudity with the American quite needlessly of course.

Anyway these are stirring times, when Clinton in cowboy shirt, and his daughter under his arm, has set out to do his holiday home video in India. There is a pose in front of the Taj Mahal, in which Clinton looks as if he has stepped straight out of a 1966 Readers' digest.

All very wholesome indeed. Apparently, most Indians have voted for America as the nation that India "should be most friendly towards.'' This is typical of India at its Jet Airways age. Jet Airways is an Indian Airline which follows, to a letter, the style and ambiance of an American airline. Flying Jet airways over the Deccan is supposed to be as materially satisfying as flying American airlines over the Rockies.

In Jet airways, there is no pretense being made of the fact that the American brand of hedonism is something that the Indians can mimic well.

Clinton was in India because of the markets, but the visit had no fizz as a news story in the rest of the world. Clinton sometimes seems to be speaking to the converted.

Happily though, the India of Reuters is not the real India, and the India of TIME magazine is somewhat like Romesh Gunasekera's version of Sri Lanka. As far as India goes, try at it might, the Western media just doesn't get it.

Momentarily though, it can be forgotten that India is not what Reuters cracks it up to be — or what Newsweek gushes about. This is sometimes especially difficult to grasp, when Indian newspapers too are also getting sucked into the vortex of market manufactured news.

Times of India is getting to be more like USA today, and bedraggled old giants like the Hindu are all staggering under this market assault on newspapers that has its origins perhaps in the United States.

But, India's marketism is slow and chaotic, and as things are always in India, there is a pleasant sense of disorderliness about the way India is courting market forces.

Writers such as Sainath ("Everybody loves a good drought'') have acquired hero status positioning themselves against the market driven direction in which the Indian newspapers are going. But, in India Sainaths can be part of the scheme of things whereas in Clinton's America total mavericks of this sort would have been operating from the great underground.

India, being the world's only functioning anarchy, is not about to be swamped by pervasive Americanism, but, unbecoming to the Indians, Clinton was adding to the feeling that the centre of gravity in India's economy lies at the American altar of the market.

Media is the chief pro-active force in creating this image which doesn't do any justice to India's diverse forces, such as residual Marxism. In Calcutta, mother Theresa may be dead, but Marxism is not, so Calcutta, a poor place, still remains vividly human and alive.....

All other places in this world may not be resilient however as India is, and this goes for Sri Lanka. With or without Jet Airways this country wants to hold hands with America and enter the promised land. The Sri Lankans are proud that India sold out to Clinton — except the Indians did it following our cue. That's our sense of direction of where we are going, with a little help from the international news agencies.

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