The image of life in Western countries that people in other countries get is often by the western media - movies or TV series or the newspapers. In my experience, there are two areas where the impressions gathered from the Western media can be quite misleading. While some of it is accidental, I suspect some of it is deliberate. It is designed to create an impression on the young, immature growing minds and make them want to migrate to the West or feel totally dissatisfied with their life in their own countries, even if they have a fairly good life and opportunities for personal growth while developing their own countries.
1) The image of life in a developed country is shown as if people are all wealthy, living an extravagant lifestyle, fast cars, fast women, partying at the beaches and nightclubs. What happens on a weekend or an yearly holiday is portrayed as if it is a regular lifestyle. What is not shown or emphasized enough is that people work bloody hard to afford a 'middle-class' lifestyle, cars are not luxuries, women do not walk around all over the town, all day in bikinis and people are not sipping martinis all day. People slog all day for a full working day, many barely have any savings, many live for a bit of fun and unwinding during the weekends or a rare holiday that they can barely afford and that most of the 'middle-class' is neck deep in debt!
2) All Western people do not sleep around with their neighbours, strangers and friends or their friends' mothers. Not all are promiscous. Even those that are more free-spirited or liberal in their love life follow very sound policies of decency in how they approach anyone and keep childrens' eyes away from inappropriate scenes (as per local standards). People do not use pick up lines and dialogues heard or seen in movies in regular life.
The illusion of unexplained wealth or easy money, lavish and a lurid promiscous lifestyle hooks in the mind of many youngsters and teenagers who are led to believe that such a lifestyle awaits them the moment they land on the shores of an 'advanced country' and that if they cannot make it there, they must try and emulate their illusions in their own country. Those that try often ends up as a crude, awful caricature of something that would never be tolerated in any advanced Western nation.
And then when people rush to immigrate into a western country either as a deluded person seeking an illusory lifestyle (landing at the airport) or a genuine refugee fleeing the horrors created in their homeland by meddling foreign powers (trying to sneak into the country without legal papers), the average westerner complains, sometimes with some justification at foolish incompetent economic migrants and confuses real refugess with them.
It would be good for decent people both in the developed and less developed countries to send an honest image of life and lifestyles in the developed world. It might discourage many deluded migrants as well as motivate many good ones to stay and contribute to making their own nations better. The young teenage mind needs a more sober and real message from all those who care.
Copyright (c) Kannan Narayanamurthy 2015
All rights reserved
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