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Mar 17, 2005

The Indian boy who cried 'NASA'
By Siddharth Srivastava

NEW DELHI - Fifteen-year-old Saurav Singh was the toast of India a few weeks back, his face splashed all over television and on the front pages of national newspapers. Reports said that Singh had topped a test conducted by the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the prestigious International Scientist Discovery (ISD) exam.

In a matter of days Saurav was being feted by the non-resident Indian community, a congratulatory note was sent by Indian President A P J Abdul Kalam, a renowned scientist, with a request that he would personally like to meet the boy. In a show of solidarity, legislators of the state of Uttar Pradesh, where the boy lives, pledged one day of their salaries so that Saurav could realize his dream of a trip to the US. Indeed, Saurav was a made-to-tell story, of a young boy who belongs to a poor family in a village fighting against odds, rich versus poor, those having it easy versus those who struggle to make it.

A coaching institute in Rajasthan that claimed that Saurav had been their student said that the boy procured a rank higher than the late Indian astronaut Kalpana Chawla (21st), an icon in this country who died in the Colombia disaster two years ago and Kalam (7th), the only two other Indians to have cleared the said exam. Saurav, in the meantime, also became a hero of the non-resident Indian community very active on the Internet, which hailed his success and pledged funds for his trip to the US.

Then came the thunderbolt. NASA denied that it ever conducted an exam called ISD and knew nothing about Saurav. A nonplussed Saurav confessed that it was not the NASA exam that he had cleared, but one issued by Oxford University. However, it was too much of a lie. Currently, Saurav is being interrogated by the police, while the people of his village have taken to the streets claiming that all of this is a conspiracy by larger forces, including NASA, to malign their boy.

But, the bigger question is: how did Saurav's story reach the magnitude it did, given the false claims. There has been the obvious pointing of fingers at the media, which has been accused of sensationalizing news at the cost of cross-checking facts. Readers of Asia Times Online may be familiar with "Frank", a frequent contributor in the Letters section, who has a constant whine that Indians tend to puff up everything about themselves and should pipe down and go about their business quietly. There has been a refrain among others as well, who say that the Indian media and community have a habit of talking too much about their achievements, which resulted in the outsourcing backlash in the US, though the number of jobs actually affected is a low fraction. The advice is to reach a position of some substance in the global scene till one is in a position to talk, as China is doing right now.

Writing in The Times of India, Washington correspondent Chidanand Rajghatta said, "Hopefully, the Saurav Singh episode will have a salutary effect on the new brand of 'gotcha' journalism coursing through the Indian media. What the incident demonstrated is the media's hunger for creating instant heroes and the value of the foreign cachet in doing this. If it's NASA, it must be a phenomenal achievement, is the unchallenged reasoning, forgetting that it's probably harder to qualify for some of India's engineering schools."

Chidanand presents some of the falsities that have been promoted by the Indian media in the past, one of which is that 35% of Microsoft's work force and 32% of NASA personnel were of Indian-origin, though the figure stands between 5-10%, still a very high proportion given the total number of Indians in the US. He also debunks the oft-promoted and romanticized love that the Indian community has for their motherland - a group of Indian-American physicians under the umbrella of the Association of American Physicians of Indian-origin met the Indian prime minister to present a check for US$55,000 toward tsunami relief, which translates into $1.37 per doctor, given the 40,000-member strength of the mostly rich doctors.

The Hindustan Times argues that what Saurav did was a harmless prank and not a crime. The boy on the other hand "has rendered us an invaluable service by reminding us not to trust everything that the media publish or broadcast, at least until they brush up their homework".

However, in the melee of media persons trying to pin down their fellow men and women, there is one more aspect that seems to have been forgotten. The hype cannot be divested from reality and there has to be an underlying story somewhere, give and take a few wrong ones, though there is only one way to judge the media, which has to be very exacting.

The latest Forbes list puts things in perspective, highlighting that India indeed is a land of contrasts and inequalities. The list of the world's billionaires put out by Forbes reveals that India ranks 8th in the world in terms of the number of billionaires and 9th in terms of the total wealth of the super rich, ahead of several "rich" countries. But, in contrast to other nations, the average Indian billionaire's wealth is equivalent to almost 9 million times the country's per capita gross domestic product (GDP). The average Norwegian billionaire's wealth is only about 42,000 times his country's per capita GDP, and for most of Western Europe, the figure is either in the tens or hundreds of thousands.

Indeed, there is a silver lining to Saurav's story. Indians around the world lined up to congratulate the boy when he talked of his supposed achievement. Saurav's story is a reflection of a dream that most Indians, rich or poor, cherish of making it to the pinnacle of achievement, whether as scientists, engineers, movie makers, film stars, sports et al.

Just a few years back, millions of Indians congregated at temples when a rumor spread that idols of revered Indian deity Lord Ganesh had miraculously started drinking milk. This correspondent does not know of any Indian who did not head for a temple, even as the sale of milk in the country sky-rocketed. The phenomenon died out as quickly as it began, the rational explanation being a curious difference in air pressure that resulted in the milk being sucked through straws off utensils.

Saurav's story is a reminder of the growing scientific temper among the young people of the country, which is any day better than a religious temperament that bedevils many others. There is a lesson for the Indian polity as well, steeped as it is on coalescing votes on the basis of caste and religious affinities. Saurav's reality might have been false, but his dream is true of every young Indian.

Siddharth Srivastava is a New Delhi-based journalist.

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