For the last few days I have refrained from commenting upon Shilpa Shetty on the Big Brother Show in the UK. After all, I thought, it is a Bollywood actress doing it for money, and the racism is part of the occupational hazard.
But seems like the media thinks I was wrong. They have been falling over each other trying to get mileage from the event.
But let us stand back for a moment and think: is the greatness of this nation to be measured by how Shilpa Shetty or any other actress behaves or is behaved to? I firmly think 'No.'
That would be like measuring America's greatness with the number of pubic hairs you can count on Britney's love cheeks, which she exposes very happily to eager paparazzi.
But we measure America by its economic and miliatary power, the prowess of its statemen, scienteists, and workers, the culture of its people, and a host of other factors.
In the hype over Shilpa Shetty we seem to have forgotten that is how India's greatness should be measured too. When Shilpa Shetty shouts Chicken Curry, that is in no way going to increase India's image before the world. For that we need to show we can do a lot of things that our license-permit Raj governments prevented us from doing for five decades.
Let us not get our priorities wrong, or we risk being pushed to the fringes of a world community which is racing to create a new world order.
