My family got their start in North America with a convenience store100 years ago. So don't you be badmouthing convenience stores. Everyone has to make a living. ;)
I like Indians, and the ones I know don't act like that way at all. Plus, India and China are the rising powers, and I'd rather India than China any day. India is very anti-terrorist most of the time, capitalist and democratic. I don't like the caste system, but in time it will end. Slowly, not in our lifetimes, but it will weaken within our lifetimes.
Maybe I'm just more idealistic than you because I'm younger. But, while I have many problems with specific incidents and events and a few fundamentalists, I really have few problems with modern Indian culture in general.
http://www.brandonsun.com/story.php?story_id=9768
Narayanan, first 'untouchable' to become India's president, dead at 85
NEW DELHI (AP) - Former president K.R. Narayanan, the first "untouchable" from India's pernicious caste system to occupy the office in a validation of the country's democratic roots, died Wednesday. He was 85.
The soft-spoken, scholarly Narayanan was admitted to an army hospital in the capital Oct. 29 with pneumonia and kidney failure. He was placed on life support two days later and died Wednesday, Defence Ministry spokesman Sitanshu Kar said.
Although the president's post in India is largely ceremonial, Narayanan showed during his 1997-2002 tenure that he was no rubber-stamp executive. He broke from precedent twice to defy the government that appointed him, refusing to sack opposition-ruled state administrations.
"He was a monumental personality, a personality who proved what (the) Indian Republic stands for," former prime minister I.K. Gujral said on private New Delhi Television. "... In him, the Indian Republic's philosophy was testified. In all the time he occupied the high office, he always upheld his oath to protect the constitution."
Narayanan's rise to the top was remarkable in a country where "untouchables" - now known as "Dalits" - are the lowest members of society, having faced ridicule and hostility for centuries.
The Dalits - literally "broken people" - are outside the caste system, a 3,000-year-old hierarchy dividing Hindus into four categories of descending social importance. Because they are without caste, the Dalits, nearly a fourth of India's billion-plus people, are considered unclean.
"Coming from a very poor family, coming up only with the dint of his own effort and labour, he proved . . . that neither religion nor caste can come in the way of a person who is able to exert himself intellectually," Gujral said.
Discrimination based on caste was outlawed in 1950, and much progress in social equality has been made since, but centuries of entrenched habits have been hard to break.
In his public statements, Narayanan never harped on the caste discrimination he faced growing up, instead emphasizing the positive.
"In fact, if you can see one consistent tendency in India, one trend in India, from the time of the Buddha onwards, it is the slow but steady movement of the lower classes among the scale of the class system," Narayanan said in a 1998 interview with state television.
"It took 2,000 years. But it is something which is going on."
The son of a traditional "Ayurvedic" medicine physician, Narayanan was born in a poor household in the village of Uzhavoor in the southern state of Kerala on Oct. 27, 1920.
He earned a bachelor's degree from the London School of Economics and worked as an English teacher, journalist and diplomat.
He once was barred from primary school because he could not afford the fees, but he stubbornly stood outside the classroom to listen to lessons.
Narayanan did so well on his final high school exams that he was given a government scholarship to continue his education.
He also received help from a fund set up for oppressed Indians by independence leader and social reformer Mohandas Gandhi, and an Indian industrialist later paid for his studies in London.
He returned to India in 1948 with a letter of introduction from a prominent economist to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. The prime minister personally recommended Narayanan for the Indian Foreign Service.
Narayanan served as India's ambassador to China and the United States, two of the most important posts in the service.
His first posting as a diplomat was to Myanmar - then known as Burma - where he met his future wife, a Burmese woman who had studied social work in India.
They married in 1950, with special permission given by Nehru, as Indian diplomats are not allowed to marry foreigners.
Narayanan turned to politics in 1980, winning a seat in Parliament on a Congress party ticket. He was vice-president before being elected the country's 10th president in 1997.
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