A Taste of India

There are so many western influences in Japan, it's possible to forget at moments that I'm in Asia. I have heard from fellow Asians some resentment about Japan's alignment with the West, rather than the rest of Asia. The current G-8 Summit is a reminder of this tension. Perhaps hosting the conference in Japan will allow for greater emphasis on China and India. It's strange to imagine an economic consortium without explicit representation from China and India, or Brazil for that matter.

At one point during a trip between hotels, my taxi stopped in front of an Indian restaurant. Almost anyone of South Asian descent will know the moment. No matter our origins, no matter our self-perceptions, South Asians in these circumstances will often look at each other and smile. As if to acknowledge a bond that transcends national or cultural boundaries. Even the vast differences between Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis seem to disappear when we leave South Asia. I suppose we finally focus more on what is common, rather than what is different.

In this case, each of the people in the restaurant smiled and bowed slightly. One of them came up to the taxi and handed me a menu from the restaurant. I can't deny a certain comfort when I saw curry, naan, and mango lassi on the menu. He spoke to me in Japanese. When I said "thank you" in English, he must have realized I do not live in Tokyo. He made the leap to Hindi, which I also do not understand. I'm embarrassed enough not understanding Japanese, but I'm even more embarrassed not understanding Hindi (after all, my wife speaks it fairly fluently). I miss out on so much because of my poor language skills.

One language that does seem to transcend boundaries is business. I'm struck by the Asian business shows, with men in suits and ties, using the same jargon as the Wall Street pundits. It's a 24 hour a day obsession, spoken in the language of currency. It's difficult to translate English into Japanese, but it's easy to find out the latest conversion rate between the British pound and the Japanese yen. BBC Asian Business Report featured a story on malnutrition in India. The story focused on a young woman who mentioned that her four children are starving. They certainly looked that way. The report mentioned that malnutrition causes $29 billion of lost productivity in India, or nearly 4% of its GDP. India's long-term productivity might be adversely affected if "they can not tap properly into these human resources". We should feed these people only because they can contribute to the economy?

When did human misery and suffering become measured as an adverse impact on GDP?