Thursday, June 01, 2006
OF BIRDS AND BEES
As if words that spell disaster weren’t quite enough, the Big Yellow magazine has a national contest going called the N G Bee. (Why that unfortunate insect is cited for all these heists in the United States is beyond me but I don’t want to get stung ). The winner this year was a chappie called Bonny Jain, an Indian-American resident of Moline, Illinois who saw off the challenge of two other precocious teenagers of Indian origin.
The bespectacled fella was almost immediately off to swot for the Spelling Bee contest, which he had entered into last year and done rather well.
I am reliably informed that our American brethren are largely mystified by the demands of geography and can barely identify their own country on the map. Happily, this doesn’t seem to spur them on to spending inordinate resources correcting this potentially dangerous aberration.
In such a country, little wonder perhaps that the winners would be nerdy bookworms who have nothing better to do than memorize large tracts of faceless data just for the prestige of hauling in a meaningless annual affair. And little wonder that so many of these kids are of Indian origin. Living out the dreams of their beaten parents, toiling, perservering……. All just to be seen as successful in a land that is and will remain alien to them !
My gripe remains that of all dazzling array of things possible in a land, folks choose to bury themselves in a pastime that comes naturally to them. Crashing bores !
At least the actual bees make honey …
