Piers Morgan trolls for a dying people
So British TV-host and former newspaper editor, Piers Morgan, is being heralded for winning his war of words with Indian Twitter after he trolled India for turning out to celebrate their returning medallists from the Rio Olympics. "Country with 1.2 billion people wildly celebrates 2 losing medals. How embarrassing is that?" he sneered, before outwitting a series of remonstrating Indians with his quick repartee.
That an expert of British tabloid-speak should win a bitching contest on that most tabloid of English-speaking platforms against people for whom English is largely a second, third, or even fourth language is no surprise.
Nor is it a surprise how gratifying Morgan seems to have found the experience. As the British inexorably sink into insignificance, winning pointless slanging matches against Indians - like excelling at sports mankind pays no attention to 99.9 per cent of the time - is a triumph they will dearly cling to.
I tweeted him myself, sending him a news article about the ten-year-old Indian girl, Rhea (her surname wasn't publicised), who recently won Britain's national Child Genius competition, along with the message: "Having Indians consistently make you look like dunces in your own country. How embarrassing is that?" He, of course, didn't reply.
Nor did he reply to the other article I tweeted to him about the academic mediocrity of native British children, who are massively outperformed by the offspring of Indian immigrants, with a message about how he, typical of his countrymen, can't handle the fact that Indians show the British up as dimwits.
Indeed, the widespread mental emptiness of the British is truly awesome and without historical precedent. Go into the hinterland here, and you will meet many people who, despite all the advantages provided by a First-World welfare state - ready access to healthcare, education, housing and so much more - are as ignorant and insular as any dust-bowl villager in Bihar, whose dreadful command of the English language would make a Paharganj autowala blush with shame.
The Brits like to attribute Indian intellectual superiority to our pushy parents, comforting themselves with the thought that it's merely immigrant zeal that makes Indians outperform them.
It doesn't occur to them that it is the limitless depth and richness of Indian culture - continental in scale, history and variety - that makes Indians much smarter: that Indians take being multilingual for granted, are exposed from birth to a myriad religious and philosophical traditions, and thus have an openness and suppleness of mind that the British painfully lack.
This expansive fluidity of character has enabled 30 million NRIs to thrive all over the planet, making Indians the world's first truly global people. And Indian academic and professional success in Britain is proof that when Indians and Brits share a comparable access to resources, Indians, equipped by their unique civilisation, will leave the British well behind.
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| That Piers Morgan has chosen to sneer at Indians shows that India is now a country whose talent and destiny, like those of America, makes the British feel inadequate. |
I didn't expect Morgan to reply. The Brits don't like having their obvious and fatal inadequacies pointed out, and this is why they are destined for extinction.
They would rather die clinging to any delusion of superiority than adapt to the fact that history is accelerating away from them.
Such a proudly monoglot and monodimensional people have no future: globalisation is a game they are simply not cut out to play.
Tata sent shivers through the British spine earlier this year, when it proposed to quit the country and axe 40,000 jobs. No UK company has anything like that leverage in India, and almost certainly never will.
Having opened itself to foreign capital more than almost any other country, the UK is not a driver of global forces but wholly at the mercy of them, especially after its decision to leave the EU. It now has to pimp itself to anyone.
There's currently a debate going on about whether to let the Chinese government go ahead with building a nuclear reactor here. You heard that right: the UK agreed to let China build a nuclear reactor on its soil - a deal one would expect a basket-case like Pakistan to sign, but which is truly flabbergasting in a First-World context. The Americans, for instance, haven't let the Chinese own an airport.
Britain is a colony now, and in profound and ludicrous denial about this. Decisions taken in Washington, Beijing, Bonn - and soon, and most painfully, Delhi - have far more influence on its people than those made in Westminster.
Indeed, the British are increasingly a marginal people in their own capital as London thrives as an international hub. It is overwhelmingly populated by those who were either born abroad are the offspring of those who were, and the city is now loathed by a vast swathe of the British public who feel completely alienated from it.
Uselessly wagging their fingers at other countries has become a neurotic national coping mechanism for the British, to balm the anguish of their terminal condition. Morgan often trolls America, so Indians should be pleased that they now also provoke his anxious need to pontificate.
Highly successful as a tabloid-editor, his psyche has always been perfectly synced with that of the parochial, ignoramus and ever-lumpen Anglotariat that seeks constant reassurance at others' expense. That Morgan has chosen to sneer at Indians shows that India is now a country whose talent and destiny, like those of America, makes the British feel inadequate.
So what if the Brits excel at the Olympics? It is no more proof of national greatness than Argentina's two World Cups victories are. Given how far the pound has plunged recently, all the gold the Brits won in Rio may simply end up smelted and sold off to lessen the UK's balance of payments deficit.
Indians should stick to excelling at what really matters: being intellectually brilliant and having cultural depth and adaptability. In today's global order, those are the qualities that will see India take its rightful place in the world - qualities that Piers Morgan, arch British dimwit that he is, lacks the capacity to even recognise, let alone emulate.