Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Of Indians and Chinese

A faithful reader of the Financial Times, I was slightly put off by a tasteless remark in the article "Costly lesson for Indians in Australia" by Amy Kazmim, published on page 8 on 24 June 2009.

Ms. Kazmin reports that "her (Ms. Thakur, an Indian student's) first semester was spent in a disappointing accountancy course pushed hard by an agent but filled only with other students from India and China". (emphasis added)

The usage of "filled with" to refer to humans is bad enough, but the insinuation that it is sub-obtimal to have said filling done with Indians and Chinese is appalling. Would it have been better if there were lesser Chinese and more Scandinavians? The obvious implication is that the mere presence of Indians and Chinese, quite irrespective of intellectual ability or motivation, tends to lower the credibility and quality of a host academic institution, and is not on at all.

I hesitate to use the word "racist", but am not sure if Ms. Kazmin's opinion is entirely undeserving of that epithet.

Friday, June 19, 2009

Of journalist and runners

Having recently watched the film Midnight Express (1978) based on the book of the same name by William Hayes, I looked up the Wikipedia article, and saw an article titled "Revisiting the land of 'Midnight Express'" by a Stephen Handelman published on 24 June, 2007 in The Star (http://www.thestar.com/News/article/228860).

The subtitle refers to Mr. Hayes as an "escaped hashish runner". The journalist's distaste for Mr. Hayes is unmistakeable, but surely he ought first to inform the police if he believes that Mr. Hayes continues to "run" hashish (which is what the noun "runner" implies).
Perhaps he meant ex-runner, and that too would be admissible only if Mr. Hayes "ran" hashish repeatedly. One is not called a jogger after having gone for one's second jog.

> I asked Hayes whether he
> worried about being part
> of a propaganda ploy.
> "I've always loved Turkey,"
> he answered cautiously.


I wonder how the journalist knows that Mr. Hayes answered cautiously? Can it be that the journalist means "sofly", or "slowly", presumably possessing no means of looking into the thought processes of another human being? But "slow", "soft" and other intonations of speech are relative - did the journalist perhaps capture a large sample and figure out what the standard deviation is?

> In the land of the Midnight Express,
> morning still arrives with a caveat.

The caveat, presumably, is that one might be subjected to the outpourings of a journalist who seems to have parted ways from truth, style and fair reporting, when one picks up the newspaper, no matter how glorious the morning otherwise is.