SRK "detained"... so what?

I noticed I hadn't blogged for about 6 months now, and I was wondering how it can be, while this Shah Rukh Khan "detension" episode at Newark Airport yesterday (incidentally India's Independence Day) hit desi media headlines. While I did have several things to write about -including my trip to India and the Taj in April last - let me give the most honest excuse, I was plain lazy to catch up with this space. (I must admit I was otherwise active with my digital indulgence by signing up on facebook and twitter in the intervening timeframe.)

Needless to say, the SRK episode did not get a fraction of the coverage in US media that it got in desi media. If SRK is trully a "global" icon like some of us claim, why would this issue not find coverage here in the US or say even in a "neutral" country like Canada? After hearing a lot of the typical desi overreaction to such incidents, it was indeed refreshing to find a relatively more digestable editorial on the TOI blog site - http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/onefortheroad/entry/don-t-make-a-big

While such episodes are not unheard of - South Indian actors such as Mamooty, Sivakumar, etc. were treated in a similar fashion recently as well, not to mention our ex-President Kalam - what is intriguing to me is how the Indian media and mainstream public alike takes these things so personally these days. Yes, it does not speak much of the US immigration intelligence to do random security grilling on visitors based just on their muslim or muslim-sounding names. However, in this post 9-11 age, such profiling is a necessary evil and has to be taken on the stride as a necessary nuisance, and nothing more. (India does such random grilling on Pakistani visitors, by the way.) If say Tom Cruise stepped in at Mumbai immigration, what are the chances that the local immigration officer would recogonize him, let alone give him the "privileged" treatment that desis seem to be expecting for SRK? After all nobody is above the law (and the whims and fancies that law can manifest itself with) and the VIP worship culture that comes so naturally to us desis is not something that the international community is willing to entertain in this day and age dominated by terror anxiety. To paint the episode with race, religion and nationality bias, warranted as it may be to a limited extent, is just not appropriate in the larger context. The call by some desis for a tit-for-tat type retaliatory action by having US visitors to India be subjected to similar action is outright silly, classless and irresponsible.

There seems to be a pattern to the manner in which such things are seen in India these days. When a desi student in Australia gets attacked, our people go ga-ga without bothering to ask if that desi student did something wrong in the first place. When a West Indian umpire gives a couple of bad decisions on the field against Indian batsmen, the BCCI pressures ICC to sack him, and succeeds. If Dr. Kalam has to go thru routine security screening to board a Continental flight, our people cry foul. While such reactions are appropriate to some reasonable degree, this seems to be the symptom of a larger dynamic at work here - that India is now clearly displaying a changed body language when it comes to how she would like to be seen/treated by the rest of the world. To the extent the escalating superiority complex that Indians seem to flaunt these days is justifiable based on their economic standing as a reckoning superpower and the political maturity as a thriving democratic nation state, such nationalistic postures may be appreciated by the international community. But if this trend grows unabated beyond those limits of tolerance, India or Indians would very soon be seen as cocky, self-serving global citizens indifferent to the ground realities dominating international thought in the 21st century.