The World Is Flat

And while you are at it, give me one hundred Abraham Georges as well-individuals who step out of their context and set a different example can have such a huge impact on the imagination of so many others. One day in February 2004, I was resting in my hotel room in Bangalore, when the phone rang. It was a young Indian woman who said she was attending a private journalism school on the outskirts of the city and wanted to know if I would come by and meet with her class. I've learned over the years that these sorts of accidental invitations often lead to interesting encounters, so I said, “What the heck, sure. I'll come.” Two days later I drove ninety minutes from downtown Bangalore to an open field in which stood a lonely journalism school and dormitory. I was met at the door by a handsome, middle-aged Indian man named Abraham George. Born in Kerala, George served in the Indian Army, while his mother immigrated to the United States and went to work for NASA. George followed her, went on to study at NYU, started a software firm that specialized in international finance, sold it in 1998, and decided to come back to India and use his American-made fortune to try to change India from the bottom-the absolute bottom-up.

One thing George learned from his time in the United States was that without more responsible Indian newspaper... [text was broken here]

When we eventually reached the school complex, though, we found neatly painted buildings, surrounded by some grass and flowers, a total contrast to the nearby hamlets. The first classroom we walked into had twenty untouchable kids at computers working on Excel and Microsoft Word. Next door, another class was practicing typing on a computer typing program. I loudly asked the teacher who was the fastest typist in the class. She pointed to an eight-year-old girl with a smile that could have melted a glacier.

“I want to race you,” I said to her. All her classmates gathered round. I crunched myself into a tiny seat in the computer stall next to her, and we each proceeded to type the same phrase over and over, seeing who could do more in a minute. “Who's winning?” I shouted. Her classmates shouted her name back and cheered her on. I quickly surrendered to her gleeful laugh.

The selection process to get into Shanti Bhavan is based on whether a child is below the poverty line and the parents are willing to send him or her to a boarding school. Shortly before I arrived, the students had taken the California Achievement Tests. “We are giving them English education so they can go anywhere in India and anywhere in the world for higher education,” said Law. “Our goal is to give them a world-class education so they can aspire to careers and professions that would have been totally beyond their reach and have been so for generations... Around here, their names will always give them away as untouchables. But if they go somewhere else, and if they are really polished, with proper education and social graces, they can break this barrier.”

Then they can become my kind of untouchables-young people who one day can be special or specialized or adaptable.

Looking at these kids, George said, “When we talk about the poor, so often it is talk about getting them off the streets or getting them a job, so they don't starve. But we never talk about getting excellence for the poor. My thought was that we can deal with the issue of inequality, if they could break out of all the barriers imposed upon them. If one is successful, they will carry one thousand with them.”

After listening to George, my mind drifted back to only four months earlier, in the fall of 2003, when I had been in the West Bank filming another documentary about the Arab-Israeli conflict. As a part of that project, I went to Ramallah and interviewed three young Palestinian militants who were members of Yasser Arafat's paramilitary Tanzim organization. What was so striking about the interview were the mood swings of these young men from suicidal despair to dreamy aspirations. When I asked one of the three, Mohammed Motev, what was the worst thing about living in the context of Israeli occupation, he said the checkpoints. “When a soldier asks me to take off my clothes in front of the girls. It's a great humiliation to me... to take off my shirt and my pants and turn around and all the girls are standing there.” It is one reason, he said, that all Palestinian young people today are just suicide bombers in waiting. He called them “martyrs in waiting,” while his two friends nodded in assent. They warned me that if Israel tried to kill Yasser Arafat, who was then still alive (and was a leader who knew how to stimulate only memories, not dreams), they would turn the whole area into a living “hell.” To underscore this point, Motev took out his wallet and showed me a picture of Arafat. But what caught my eye was the picture of a young girl next to it.