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Strategies & Market Trends : India Coffee House -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mohan Marette who wrote (214)	4/17/1998 11:03:00 PM
From: Sam Citron	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12475

Hi Mohan, Thanks for pointing me to those pictures. Every trip is different. I was seventeen when I arrived alone on a bus from Lahore to Ferozepur, and India looked like paradise to me after spending a cold winter in Iran and Afghanistan. One thing that was immediately apparent was that women were treated with much more respect in India. I immediately set out for Rishikesh to try to learn a little bit about meditation and yoga. Was surprised to see how many Americans and Canadians were attracted to Mahesh Yogi. I listened to a couple of his lectures and moved on, not ready to be anyone's disciple. I suppose that in those days I equated spirituality with asceticism and was most attracted to the "sky-clad" sadhus who seemed to reject society as I did in those days. The Vietnam War was raging, of course, and I did not feel very proud to be an American. The US was in deep turmoil over the war and I had decided to drop out of college to travel and try to figure out what I wanted to do. It turned out to be a 2 year journey, about 6 months of which was spent in India. I returned twice since, for 3 months at a time. India is a big country and there is alot to see. Later on I studied Urdu at Harvard. The choice in South Asian languages was Urdu or Sanskrit, and I wanted to study a language I could speak. Unfortunately, the course was taught by an American. In fact most Harvard courses touching on India were taught by Americans--Diana Eck in Indian religion and a crew of development economists who were quite popular on the Cambridge, DC, Dacca shuttle but had seemingly never even stepped foot in an Indian village. Most of them discussed "development" without a glimpse of the human element. It was reductio ad absurdem -- land, labor, capital and technology -- all the disembodied variables expressed mathematically to prove they were really serious and scientific. Not that they ever even attempted to define what they meant by development. It was patently obvious that they thought that development meant to resemble themselves. So much for my dreams of joining the World Bank. Nevertheless I met a number of talented Indian economists in Cambridge and became convinced that the country would be just fine, as long as they got rid of these foreign economists! SC