The West and the East--The tortoise comes in from the rear!

This seems to be the decade of the tortoise!

This laggard (one of the synonym describing this shelled friend in Thesaurus) has come in from the back and overtaken the hare!

Aesop's Fable tells this story where the timeline is just a few hours; but the tortoises of the world have been trudging for centuries and the hares (plural sense) have been running as well..........looks like the hares have tired out, at least for now, from this race of centuries!

The West is the hare, the East the tortoise-(this is the case since the great Industrial Revolution in the west.....otherwise the East was for centuries fabulously rich-Alexander the Great's soldiers needed several thousand camels to take away loot from the Persian capital, Persepolis.....the kings of india wore rubies the size of eggs!); now, the tortoise, this slow shelled scaly skinned creature is aptly carrying a burden on its back- the shell, very easily symbolic of the East, burdened with its baggage of poverty( more poverty since its colonisation by the West,)...... religious prejudices, "slow" modern development begun decades after the West, huge number of ethnic groups, high castes and low, and many other disabilities.

The West, inventions of the modern age, the Industrial Revolution, discoveries, science and medicine, Isaac Newton, Marie Curie and Pasteur, the humanists and social scientists, with an ugly side as well, the pirates and the colonists, the slave traders and the racists, apartheid, and dictators like Hitler and Communism, East Europe and Bosnia. (Of course, the East gives us the Pol Pot in Cambodia, Saddam Hussien, the Taliban, the harsh regimes of North Korea, and China- harsh where it suits them.)

Somewhere in between is the great continent of Africa, mother of the human race! Its people under great burden, first 'inflicted' by their ancient rulers, then by the western masters, and now by their new leaders; and you have Darfur, Zimbabwe, and Congo, blood diamonds, and a new breed of mercenaries that terrorise its people, Idi Amin and others. But the one person that belongs to all ages and peoples of the world is Nelson Mandela, whose "mentor" Mahatma Gandhi the great sage of the modern world who had spent some years in South Africa.)

I would group Africa with the East, so the election of the first Afro-American as the President of the United States, Barack Obama, in a sense stands for the tortoise winning (although Obama himself never never uses his black background to any advantage,)...........and, in hindsight we should not be that surprised.

The one voice that is heard so avidly in the US is that of Oprah Winfry, an Afro-American (this info for those very few who don't know!) , America's best rated talk show hostess, and who the world saw crying at Obama's speech in Chicago (after winning elections;) and the greatest icon of that country, Hollywood, has more than its fair share of black actors: Morgan Freeman, Eddie Murphy, Will Smith, Denzel Washington, Jammie Foxx, Samuel Jackson, Forest Whitaker, Halley Berry, Queen Latifah and Whoopi Goldberg. US sports has been dominated by Afro-Americans for decades, the athletic fields at the Olympics splashed with black, not just from America but from Africa as well!

And now, China and India, and the wealthy countries of the Middle East, Dubai and Saudi Arabia, cheap and very hard working labour, software and outsourcing, oil money, seems to confirm that the tortoise is in the winning game!

And what happened to the hare?
Decades of a very liberal society, born from the very high ideal of freedom, but which has given the world hard rock music and drugs that have held young minds in the new shackles of free sex and drugs, hip culture and what else!

Whilst the deprived child in India, for example, did his school homework below the street lamps for lack of lights in his home(and because he works during the day), a burning desire to educate himself, and thus seek freedom from poverty, his western counterpart chose a different kind of freedom, filling the streets of cities with violence and petty theft. (Please forgive me for the generalisations, the west still has the very best educational institutions with a fair share of the young there studying for the "college degree.")

And the West chose to work at very high salaries, and spend spend spend, no savings and mollycoddling by their governments, ............buy homes on unaffordable mortgages, change cars on a whim, go on world tours, over dress, fashion and cosmetics; and the masters of the great companies, with their craze for profits and piracy in their veins, chose to take jobs where they did work cheaply (to the few people I have talked with, westerners, they seem to point fingers at India and China for the loss of their jobs. This is only partly true, the blame should also be placed on those thousands of Companies and their CE Os for deciding to take jobs to the cheap markets.....you cannot clap without two hands!)

And, no one seems to know that the lowly priced Indian Rupee, in the Foreign Currencies Exchange Market, proved a boon...............a salary of Ind. Rs 50,000 per month-- (it can buy you the world in India-bread Rs 17/; good pair of shoes Rs 4000/; haircut-gents Rs 100/; a midsized Chevy- Rs 4,00,000 [US$ 8200])-- works to US $ 1,000 per month!!! .........................and the hare got left behind!

But the world should be a place of equal opportunities, no hare and no tortoise; somehow a logical, not equal, distribution of all the world's resources, an end to all forms of exploitation, a sharing of and pooling of talent and jobs, an ideal Platonic world where the whole human race stands to benefit............with the first logical requirement- all those men who would do anything for money, power and personal gain, somehow neutralised!