Saturday, February 11, 2006
Of Mohamed and Naked Mary
While 12 cartoons published on the Prophet in a small Danish newspaper has incited global outrage (which is increasingly taking funnier and stupider proportions), the picture of Virgin Mary with nude breasts and a howling child hasnt created more than a whisper. A clear example of how institutionlisation can make a difference between how the two biggest religions in the world react!
Tuesday, February 17, 2004
The Discovery of a Nation
It’s been six months since I first landed in Seoul, South Korea to pursue my post-graduation in Korea University here. But I can still feel the rumble and jumble with which I pulled into this alien country.
For starters, I was coming to Korea of all places. To most Indians, ‘foreign’ only means America. The less fundamentalist ones might just take the pain of considering UK and Australia as well. But that’s it. Korea sounded like middle earth in the ‘Lord of the Rings’ - something that existed beyond the realm of one’s concern or imagination.
As if these feelings were not enough to churn my stomach, I had more in store. At the Delhi airport, the beefiness of my luggage occupied all my attention - because of a certain aunt who assured us of ‘her pull’ with airport authorities, only to eventually pull off a coup on me. And at the Seoul airport, I gave yet another example of my inanity by losing both my passport and suitcase – temporarily. And if that wasn’t still enough, I was fed on what seemed to be boiled grass, lost my way around the city and realized to my horror that English was as remote in this country as sex is in my life.
But a lot of water has passed under the bridge since then. After that first cheerless day, things changed for the better. Well that would be an understatement - things changed for the bestest. In Korea I discovered what I never could in my own country.
For starters, the people. The first thing that struck me, right from the moment I stepped onto the airport, was the kindness and amiability of Koreans. I can never forget the way the Korean guys who came to receive me at the airport helped me get back my lost passport or the way in which a Korean friend helped me get a computer. I can cite instance after instance, example after example of Korean generosity. If the true measure of the heart of a culture is how they treat you when you’re vulnerable, then the Korean heart is unambiguously big.
It is probably an extension of this Korean integrity that the crime rate in the country is almost zilch. Forget rape or arson, even theft is a rarity in Seoul. My colleagues from other countries and myself were shocked when we landed at a closed beer shop at 3 in the morning to discover the entire stock of the shop coolly lying outside – the shopkeeper probably sound asleep in his bed, sure that nobody will come and steal his beer.
Culture is stoutly omnipresent everywhere you go in Korea. Be it restaurants, universities, markets or places of work, the smell of mores and traditions is unmistakable. Koreans, nevertheless, believe that the culture that one sees on the roads of Seoul today is not staunchly Korean but has a Chinese smacking. It is really awe-inspiring that a culture that was consciously and viciously attacked for hundreds of years still manages to carry itself with astounding dignity.
Koreans may be a traditional lot, but the hangouts in Seoul easily beat hollow the temples and other such relics of the past. Coex is an astonishing piece of work, what with its dazzling shopping malls and gigantic cinema theatre. While Lotte World and Seoul Land have not been in the range of my sight in the six months that I spent in Seoul, word has it that they are superb amusement parks. At night atop the 63 Building and Seoul Tower, you can see the lights of the city illuminating various points of interest. Then, of course, there are the bustling markets of the city – Namdaemun, Dongdaemun, Hannam, Itaewon etc – where there can be no end to your choice or haggling. It’s undoubtedly a shopper’s dream come true.
One reason that Seoul is often passed off as a global city in academic conversations, despite its odium for the English language, is its state of the art infrastructure. Few cities can rout Seoul, when it comes to roads, buses, trains and internet connectivity. The roads are like airfields – broad and well developed. The road network includes 19 spur roads which go out in all directions from central districts to outer areas and ring roads which disperse vehicles from the spur roads to several bypass ways. The intra city trains are exemplary in their operation and performance. They are considered the most effective traffic system in Seoul and link the farthest of its parts. The broadband has penetrated so deeply in South Korea - 50% of all online households are connected to a high-speed internet connection – that it is cited as the most ‘wired’ country in the world.
Well if you are thinking that I am painting a too-rosy-to-be-true picture of Korea, then think again. I have no intentions of wishing away what I perceive is the single most important problem of this country - the education system. My biggest grouse against the system is its inertia towards the study of English language. All efforts in this direction, at least to my eye, appear facile and inadequate. In the quest of being a global city, Seoul certainly is found wanting on this crucial frontier. A second nag is the dearth of competition and profusion of mediocrity in the universities. For starters, the curriculum at both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels is a joke – the masters level education not even matching the undergrad standards of countries like US, UK and believe it or not India. Then, there is a laughable grading system in place that awards even average students with As. At the bottom of this shaggy system is an unwritten rule known to all students that their mere existence at a university is enough to land them jobs. Hence, no initiative on their part. And, of course, the teachers in the true Korean spirit of generosity are kind to their apprentices, not forcing any load on them.
While such an education system will always be a minor hitch in Korea’s path towards ‘completeness’, it doesn’t take away anything from the country’s so many other accomplishments. A more vital issue, I feel, is the preservation of the magnificence and opulence of this country. And that calls for a reassertion of the values that made it successful in the first place and which the younger Koreans seem to be doubting nowadays.
For starters, I was coming to Korea of all places. To most Indians, ‘foreign’ only means America. The less fundamentalist ones might just take the pain of considering UK and Australia as well. But that’s it. Korea sounded like middle earth in the ‘Lord of the Rings’ - something that existed beyond the realm of one’s concern or imagination.
As if these feelings were not enough to churn my stomach, I had more in store. At the Delhi airport, the beefiness of my luggage occupied all my attention - because of a certain aunt who assured us of ‘her pull’ with airport authorities, only to eventually pull off a coup on me. And at the Seoul airport, I gave yet another example of my inanity by losing both my passport and suitcase – temporarily. And if that wasn’t still enough, I was fed on what seemed to be boiled grass, lost my way around the city and realized to my horror that English was as remote in this country as sex is in my life.
But a lot of water has passed under the bridge since then. After that first cheerless day, things changed for the better. Well that would be an understatement - things changed for the bestest. In Korea I discovered what I never could in my own country.
For starters, the people. The first thing that struck me, right from the moment I stepped onto the airport, was the kindness and amiability of Koreans. I can never forget the way the Korean guys who came to receive me at the airport helped me get back my lost passport or the way in which a Korean friend helped me get a computer. I can cite instance after instance, example after example of Korean generosity. If the true measure of the heart of a culture is how they treat you when you’re vulnerable, then the Korean heart is unambiguously big.
It is probably an extension of this Korean integrity that the crime rate in the country is almost zilch. Forget rape or arson, even theft is a rarity in Seoul. My colleagues from other countries and myself were shocked when we landed at a closed beer shop at 3 in the morning to discover the entire stock of the shop coolly lying outside – the shopkeeper probably sound asleep in his bed, sure that nobody will come and steal his beer.
Culture is stoutly omnipresent everywhere you go in Korea. Be it restaurants, universities, markets or places of work, the smell of mores and traditions is unmistakable. Koreans, nevertheless, believe that the culture that one sees on the roads of Seoul today is not staunchly Korean but has a Chinese smacking. It is really awe-inspiring that a culture that was consciously and viciously attacked for hundreds of years still manages to carry itself with astounding dignity.
Koreans may be a traditional lot, but the hangouts in Seoul easily beat hollow the temples and other such relics of the past. Coex is an astonishing piece of work, what with its dazzling shopping malls and gigantic cinema theatre. While Lotte World and Seoul Land have not been in the range of my sight in the six months that I spent in Seoul, word has it that they are superb amusement parks. At night atop the 63 Building and Seoul Tower, you can see the lights of the city illuminating various points of interest. Then, of course, there are the bustling markets of the city – Namdaemun, Dongdaemun, Hannam, Itaewon etc – where there can be no end to your choice or haggling. It’s undoubtedly a shopper’s dream come true.
One reason that Seoul is often passed off as a global city in academic conversations, despite its odium for the English language, is its state of the art infrastructure. Few cities can rout Seoul, when it comes to roads, buses, trains and internet connectivity. The roads are like airfields – broad and well developed. The road network includes 19 spur roads which go out in all directions from central districts to outer areas and ring roads which disperse vehicles from the spur roads to several bypass ways. The intra city trains are exemplary in their operation and performance. They are considered the most effective traffic system in Seoul and link the farthest of its parts. The broadband has penetrated so deeply in South Korea - 50% of all online households are connected to a high-speed internet connection – that it is cited as the most ‘wired’ country in the world.
Well if you are thinking that I am painting a too-rosy-to-be-true picture of Korea, then think again. I have no intentions of wishing away what I perceive is the single most important problem of this country - the education system. My biggest grouse against the system is its inertia towards the study of English language. All efforts in this direction, at least to my eye, appear facile and inadequate. In the quest of being a global city, Seoul certainly is found wanting on this crucial frontier. A second nag is the dearth of competition and profusion of mediocrity in the universities. For starters, the curriculum at both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels is a joke – the masters level education not even matching the undergrad standards of countries like US, UK and believe it or not India. Then, there is a laughable grading system in place that awards even average students with As. At the bottom of this shaggy system is an unwritten rule known to all students that their mere existence at a university is enough to land them jobs. Hence, no initiative on their part. And, of course, the teachers in the true Korean spirit of generosity are kind to their apprentices, not forcing any load on them.
While such an education system will always be a minor hitch in Korea’s path towards ‘completeness’, it doesn’t take away anything from the country’s so many other accomplishments. A more vital issue, I feel, is the preservation of the magnificence and opulence of this country. And that calls for a reassertion of the values that made it successful in the first place and which the younger Koreans seem to be doubting nowadays.
