RealWomenOnline.com: Mom, Historian, Writer, Intellectual -- features my mother this week.
Answering questions on India and weblogs, Amma says:
"India is a country of illiterates, of poor people, and of lack of infrastructure. Talking about weblogs and relating them to nation building is a meaningless exercise"
and
"Weblogs are the fancy of a few people and in my opinion, they have no role to play in India at this time."The interviewer, Ashwini probably was as stunned and surprised as I was upon this declaration. I've thought a lot about it since, and I must say I agree with the opinion. It's not that India doesn't need blogs -- it does, like it needs nuclear weapons, communication satellites, and computers [see why], but their role must be seen with the overall scheme of nation building.
On a Related Matter...
"I found it distressing that to cater for the fancy of the few, the rest of society was put to so much inconvenience and turmoil." -- that's what my father wrote in 2001 after noticing illiterate refugees laying fiber-optic cables to build the Silicon Valley of India. "These people have never made or received a telephone call in their lifetime!"
