When you read Vir Sanghvi’s Counterpoint (every Sunday in HT), it is often difficult to contradict his flow of logic. He carries the readers with him, and though he seems somewhat less sophisticated (according to me) compared to Karan Thapar, the other famous Sunday HT columnist, I find Vir more convincing.
Take his article in today’s HT (Sep 9) on Mother Teresa. It’s titled, Mother Teresa’s Feet of Clay. He makes good judgment of Mother’s hypocrisy in other facets of life despite her works for the poor.
I select the following passage from Vir’s essay that drives home the point that Mother became a celebrity because she was a ‘white’ woman.
No journalist will deny that Mother Teresa would not have been a great international story if she had been a Bengali woman or, even, a Bihari man. Her USP was that she was white and she worked in conditions that most white people regarded as being just one step removed from hell.
You don’t have to take my word for it. Just ask yourself a simple question. Given that the Missionaries of Charity continue to do the same work that they did when the Mother was alive, shouldn’t the new head of the order receive the same kind of international acclaim?
And yet, she is not even a household name in India let alone anywhere else in the world. Could this be because she is not a white person who dirties her hands in the slums of Calcutta? Could it be because her name is Sister Nirmala Joshi?
As I write this I’m reminded of Chitrita Banerji’s recent article, Poor Calcutta, in Sep 5 New York Times. Let me quote a small piece from her writing that conforms to Vir’s take.
..but I soon realized that my colleague was seriously inquiring about my city’s suffering humanity and its ministering angel — the only images Calcutta evoked for him and countless others in the West. When Mother Teresa died eight months later, 10 years ago today, foreign dignitaries and the Western news media descended on the city. The reports on the funeral portrayed a city filled with starving orphans, wretched slums and dying people abandoned on the streets, except for the fortunate ones rescued by Mother Teresa.
I completely agree with what you have writte. It was known to us, calcuttans, now Vir has unfolded the true story
While that is true, what is also true is once Mother Teresa is canonized (i.e. officially declared to be a saint by the Vatican), Kolkata may become a must-visit place by the Catholic tourists – a money-churning possibility. Perhaps that will be Mother’s ultimate tribute to the city that brought her fame.