The first thing that hits anyone coming from a place like Bombay is the casual sex appeal of the women here. Most young women (and there are lots of them in a university town like Cambridge) have beautiful bodies and love flaunting them.
The other thing that hits you if you are a vegetarian who likes spicy food is how bland American food is. Three days of it can get on your nerves!
I wouldn't pound anything into their heads.
Right now, I've been in Boston for just six days so it is very difficult to judge. But my impression of it is that of a society that's very materialistic and in a great deal of a hurry. So I would like to share my favorite Zen koan with them. It goes:
Sitting alone,
doing nothing
spring comes
and the grass
grows by itself
I guess I fall into the category that my friend Professor Kenneth Keniston of MIT would classify as a digerati.
I speak English, think in English, had a cell phone back in Bombay and a PC and an Internet account. I am an urbanized, Westernized Indian male, and our lifestyles are wildly at variance with the rest of the country. We probably have more in common with New York than with a village or town in India.
So, professionally, there has been no great problem. In fact, India has one of the largest English-language presses in the world, though it is estimated that only around 5 percent of Indians speak English. Five percent of a billion (almost) adds up to a lot.
If you are in the above five percent, you are OK because mighty Microsoft sells Windows only in English.
The rest of India is out of the mainstream of the digital age because Windows is not available in any of the other 18 official Indian languages. So even if you have the money, you cannot use a PC unless you know English.
The telephone density is also very low at a meager 1/1000. So there is a long way to go; see my article on this issue.
Travel, travel, travel.
Get out of your five-star hotels and travel. As Gandhi said, the real India (still) lives in the villages.
The Knight Science Journalism Fellowships is quite easily the best science journalism fellowship in the world. This fellowship offers us a great opportunity to get in touch with exciting developments like Quantum Computing, etc., under development in the labs in MIT and Harvard.
Since I also teach journalism, it's a great opportunity to watch some great teachers in action. Above all it is a great opportunity to interact with some highly accomplished fellow science journalists.
This is one of the best ones that I have read in a long time:
Chinese scientists dug 50 meters underground and discovered small pieces of copper. After studying these pieces for a long time, China announced that the ancient Chinese 25,000 years ago had a nationwide telephone network.
Naturally, the Japanese government was not that easily impressed. They ordered their own scientists to dig even deeper. 100 meters down, they found small pieces of glass and they soon announced that the ancient Japanese 35,000 years ago already had a nationwide fiber network.
Indian scientists were outraged. They dug 200 meters underground, but found absolutely nothing. They concluded that the ancient Indians 55,000 years ago had cellular telephones.
Copyright 1998, Thomas L. Mangan
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