All content creators obsess over stats and I am no exception. However, I check the visitor stats to my website for quality, not quantity. I have long ago accepted the fact I will not get millions of visits every month. In today’s world, audio-visual content is the highest currency; it’s almost impossible to get an article go viral on its own. (There is a multi-million dollar industry based on how to make audio clips of upcoming musicians go viral by gaming the TikTok algorithm and land a record deal; it’s fascinating.)
I look for quality in my website statistics. So I get excited to see a visitor from a place like Aruba or Åland Islands. I imagine someone reading my article thousands of miles away and there is a chance that I may have made them stop and think – after all, that is the aim of this website.
Here’s a graph of visitors to my website every year as a percentage of total visitors.
Right from the start, the highest number of visitors were from the US, followed by Indian visitors. I have pondered over the reasons for this but so far I cannot come up with anything credible.
So far, I have written 80 articles on movies, most of them on Hollywood or international movies and 42 articles on books. It is possible that some of my thoughts may have resonated with the American readers. But this makes me wonder. What does an average reader in Wyoming or Seattle think about me, assuming they do so at all? Do I come across as just another American blogger? One specialty of my readers is that they never leave comments. They visit, read, and tiptoe back to the ether so I never know what they thought about the article.
Few years back, I received a job offer from a top national lab in the US. After mulling it over many a sleepless nights, I declined because I no longer got excited by doing research in physics.
There are no rights or wrongs in such decisions, but these decisions are life changing. In hindsight, I think I made the more right decision. I would have been a misfit in the American culture. America is famous for being the melting pot of the world. People from all over the world migrate and become part of the American culture. As I have grown older, I am loving the Indian culture and traditions more and more. Not sure how happy I would have been to give all that up. (I am reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s In Other Words at the moment and it made these thoughts come into sharper focus. She describes her experience of growing up in the US as a child born to immigrant Indian parents.)
I was reminded of this again today when I read the newsletter in The New York Times titled “Matt Damon, Fran Drescher and an Indian Soybean Farmer on 2024.” The first part lists interview excerpts from people about what they hope 2024 would bring. The choice of participants was rather curious, 11 people in total, nine from the United States, one each from India and Afghanistan. Except for one person from the US who was a truck driver, rest of the Americans were highly accomplished persons. Even the woman from Afghanistan was a tech CEO helping Afghan artisans. Matt Damon talked about the wonderful work done with Water.org.
The only Indian selected was a poor farmer.
To give you a better idea about how lopsided this is, imagine this being done as a live interview. All the participants are standing on the stage and the camera pans over each one as they say their piece – CEOs, an actor, an actress, a Harvard professor. Second to last is Martin Schimdt, president of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, speaking about the IBM Quantum System.
Right after Dr. Schimdt, we have the participant from India, a poor farmer from Madhya Pradesh.
Each participant is hopeful about the future, even the tech CEO from war battered Afghanistan. Only the Indian farmer talks about not having enough money to buy his son a laptop.
I find it very interesting that from a population of 1.4 billion, the only eligible Indian participant was a poor farmer. Of the top of my head, l could rattle off an endless list of names of highly accomplished Indians.
Why not ask S. Somanath, Chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), who oversaw the successful Moon landing at the lunar south pole, about his plans for 2024? He would have been an ideal candidate after the president of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
The title of the newsletter was catchy enough to make you click. It certainly made me click given that Matt Damon is one of my favourite actors and I have wholeheartedly praised his performances in The Invictus and The Bourne Trilogy.
This was my reply in the comments section and it was approved but from past experience, such replies never get enough ‘reccomends’ to stay on top and are quickly lost.
Just wondering how the participants for the first part were picked. India registered 100000+ startups in 2023. If the only Indian participant you could find was a poor Indian farmer, this represents a rather skewed image of a nation that is now world’s fifth largest economy. I am exasperated by the western coverage that steadfastly ignores the wealthy and advanced side of India.
Perhaps a more balanced gathering would include a homeless person from California, an unemployed worker from Kansas or any of the millions of mothers affected by the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
I read the South China Morning Post regularly, mainly for news on Chinese economy. It amuses me that the news coverage about India in SCMP is always negative or neutral but never positive. I would be surprised if it were otherwise, given the current state of affairs.
I have higher expectations from The New York Times. It is one of the top newspapers in the world. It is read by government officials, diplomats, CEOs. Nuance matters, perceptions matter. Our views on any issue are not formed overnight, they are created on a day-by-day basis as the brain processes new information. A slightly negative bias may be enough to tilt one’s views in one direction or another.
One can find examples of such biases in a variety of areas. Despite improved economic capability and propects, global credit rating agencies have not changed their ratings for India. S&P and Filch maintain their BBB rating while Moody’s has not budged from its Baa3 rating. These are the lowest possible sovereign credit ratings and are indicators of high risk profile. This does not match with reality when India is the fastest growing economy that grew at 7.6 percent in the last quarter.
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Image at the beginning of the article shows Jai Prakash Yantra in Jaipur, an instrument to measure altitudes, azimuths, hour angles, and declinations. It consists of two hemispherical bowl-based sundials with marked marble slabs that map inverted images of sky and allow the observer to move inside the instrument. It is one of the 19 astronomical instruments built by the Rajput King Sawai Jai Singh. It was completed in 1734. The collection known as Jantar Mantar also includes the biggest sundial in the world.
Further Reading
Rigid or biased: How global rating agencies missed India’s growth pulse, Neha Bothra, Forbes India, December 27, 2023.
Watch This Guy Work, and You’ll Finally Understand the TikTok Era, Brendan I. Coerner, Wired, October 19, 2023.
