By Awatif Al-Alawi
In his book “Diwaniya Chats”, Kuwaiti writer Hamad Al-Mohsen Al-Hamad mentioned an anecdote that goes back to the 1960s about an elderly man who was at in his sons’ farm in Najd and saw three men with dark complexions working there.
Inquiring about the three strangers, one of his sons said that they were Indians brought to work in the farm. The old man was shocked. “Oh my God! We used to go to their country seeking better lives and now they work for us!” the old man exclaimed.
That story came to my mind while reading a joke a friend WhatsApped me making fun of Indians’ naivety’ as usual.
Frankly speaking, I do not know whether I should feel bad or laugh at the naivety’ of those poor people making such jokes thinking that they are virtuosos, hotshots and the only geniuses of their time.
I actually do not blame them because they measure genius and creativity by the amount of money they have — money that we got from lakes of petroleum we were born to find underneath us and now enjoy their fruits, no thanks to us.
We are delusional by thinking that we are Allah’s chosen people and that everyone else has been only created to serve us without complaints. We are forgetting that some of our grandparents used to work as wandering salesmen and peddlers on Indian roads and some used to take whatever job they could to make a living for their folks back in Kuwait! I invite you, the ones who make fun of Indians and only view them as idiots waggling their heads sideways without understanding anything, to read what the British journalist Angela Saini says in her book “Geek Nation” to realize your true value compared to the Indians you are making fun of.
Saini says that “Indians and individuals of Indian origins wherever they are in this universe are famous for being professional, hardworking, skilled and computer-obsessed people.
Almost one in five of all medical and dental staff in the UK is of Indian origin, and one in six employed scientists with science or engineering doctorates in the US is Indian.
By the turn of the millennium, there were even claims that 38 per cent of all engineers in Silicon Valley were of Indian origin, with Indians running 750 of its tech companies there”. She added that this was what Jawaharlal Nehru aimed at when he insisted that the Indian constitution includes the following statement: “It will be the duty of each Indian citizen to promote science, human principles and the spirits of inquiry and reform”.
She stressed that he wanted a nation of geniuses and that was what he got. “An Indian government study showed that 36 percent of NASA’s scientists, 38 percent of the doctors working in the US, 34 percent of Microsoft employees, 28 percent of IBM employees and 17 percent Intel employees are Indians,” she added reminding that the USB was invented by the Indian Ajay Bhatt, the creator of the Pentium computer processor was the Indian scientist Vinod Dham and the inventor of Hotmail, who transferred the world from using conventional mail to electronic mail was the Indian engineer Sabeer Bhatia.
Google’s deputy president in Europe and the deputy CEO for Asia, Latin America and the Pacific and the founder of i2 Technologies are all Indians.
That is why Indians are known as ‘IT and software godfathers’ worldwide. I do not have enough space to speak further about India’s self-sufficiency in food and medicine or the prestigious status it achieved in the world of satellites and automobile production.
Nine-tenths of the diamonds used worldwide are finished in India.
Most importantly, India is the seventh country worldwide in terms of its arsenal of nuclear weapons.
So now, how can we after all this make fun of Indians?!
I am afraid that when we run out of petrol, we will go back to work on Indian streets and then Indians would circulate jokes about ‘brainless Kuwaitis’ (Kuwaiti mako mokh)!
—Translated by Kuwait Times from Al-Anbaa
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