All President Bush said was that India should be proud of itself that increasing spending power of its citizens is one of the reasons for the present global food shortage. It is a fact. But all hell broke loose in India.

I remember a cartoon in the Times of India showing a fat American couple strolling in a dirty Delhi street with beggars eating from the garbage dump. The husband says something like “no wonder there is food shortage back home, these guys are eating a lot now.”

We Indians have always been very sensitive. Anyone says the least derogatory thing (real or imagined) about us and we are on our feet and protesting! I think it is because of an inferiority complex that runs in our blood since the British came to rule over us.

Anyway, no one bothered to check what Bush had said and in what context. One can hardly expect a mature response from complexed minds

The way it was reported in the western media raises our suspicions too. Bush’s statement was not clearly carried in most US newspapers. Is it that some media houses in the US feel that the country has had enough of Republican rule and it was time for Obama or Clinton? The deliberate bias against Bush in the media is perhaps to taint McCain image somehow. The idea is to show Bush as an idiot and as someone who is against India and China; the communities of these two countries amongst US voters is not unsubstantial.

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