Deshpande!

In the article "The Confident Gaze" written by Shekhar Deshpande analyzes promotional tactics used by National Geographic magazine, mainly focusing on their new magazine celebrating 50 years of India. Deshpande claims in his article that National Geographic "is quite sensitive to trouble spots and trouble contexts; it does not pretend to evade such situations. But while it covers or represents such issues or situations, it can sanitize and even the blood and gore of conflict"(2). In essence Deshpande is saying that National Geographic does not avoid suffering, but makes it disassociates it from its reader, keeping the reader in their comfort zone. Deshpande goes on to make a similar, bolder claim, saying “This power to transform the most repulsive results of human actions around the world into images that are digestible is what makes for the culture of National Geographic.”(2) This is an extremely bold claim, Deshpande is directly accusing National Geographic of exploiting human suffering in a way so that Westerners can “enjoy” these photos, but not feel connected with the problems being presented. Deshpande’s ends his article by questioning whether India actually has catching up to do, as the National Geographic article implied, saying “but it has a lot of catching up to do if “catching up” has to mean something”. By this, Deshpande was saying that Westerners may believe that India needs to “catch up”, but India may not want to “catch up” to Western society, they may want to live differently, in the way they always have.