Trying Really Hard To Like Seth Stevenson

Check out this article on Slate describing Seth Stevenson's effort and my e-mail addressed to him:

Seth,
Ref: Your article: http://slate.msn.com/id/2107063/entry/2107071/

When you mentioned the piles of garbage, homeless people, the urine stench and the panhandlers, for a moment I thought you were referring to the Tenderloin district in San Francisco. Well, not quite - the drug-peddlers were missing from the picture; but hey, Lord Ativan must've compensated for that. Anyway, when I get a little home-sick (me having taken the hi-tech route to the Silicon Valley from India), I hang out in the Tenderloin to soak in the ambience. In fact, I do better, I volunteer at soup kitchens for the homeless to absolve myself of the brown-man's guilt. Oh, I do actually cut checks, rather big ones for my favorite charities for the homeless in structured and figured-out America. Where do you get off (your high horse) Hunter Thompson?

In taking exception to Stevenson's myopic piece on India, I am also quite convinced that he would try hard to like any other country without the minimal effort required in understanding what makes a country tick. Case in point is his misanthropic views of other tourists. Having said that, I admire his gumption for opening his mouth to voice his albeit misplaced views in a world of politically correct travel writers and their readers. My beef with his rhetoric is that while he has nothing but pure disdain for the common tourist, he himself never rose above their ilk to reveal another dimension to the country that thrives amidst its chaos. Furthermore, he harbors a thinly-veiled disgust towards those visitors on a spiritual quest. Why so? Stevenson's balck and white world is limited to his immediate perception; everything beyond his comprehension cannot be of any worth. His other gaffe is his failure to recognize the parallels between the inner cities of his figured-out and structured backyard. Besides over-the-counter Ativan, his cultural takeaways are as shallow as his faculties of observation.