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I sat in on a class with Saskia Sassen for about two weeks in college – and disagreed with on almost every point and finally, got out of the class, since every class ended with me arguing with her. One of her points, though, resonated with me, and is still foremost on my mind: globalization has a profound impact on the people see themselves. I disagreed with her at the time, because I felt that in my experience, people often used their identity to show others how they were unique, and different from the globalized norm.

One of the more interesting things that I’ve noticed this year is the Americanization of the word. By which I mean others beginning to identify their experiences and themselves in terms of American events. This is true, most of all, for India. For example:

• The horrific attacks in Bombay at the end of November were called “India’s September 11″.
• The Satyam accounting scandal is being called “India’s Enron”.
• Watching ski-jumping, a decidedly non-American sport, several of the competitors called Vierschanzen their “Superbowl”.
• In explaining the deadly assault that killed Palestinian women and children seeking refuge in a UN School, an Israeli official called it “unfortunate collateral damage”, which are precisely the words used by an American military spokesman to describe the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999.
• One of the more interesting ones I recently heard is “Viet Nam was America’s Afghanistan”, though to be temporally correct, “Afghanistan was the Soviet’s Viet Nam”.

I am not sure why this has happened with increasing frequency lately. Saskia would probably say something having to dumb it down for American media boffins to understand, while Bobby Pape would probably argue it has something to do with explaining to Americans – the main audience for these sorts of things – why it matters. What I am sure about, though, is that in trying to compress these events in to American-centric soundbites, not only are the individual triumphs and tragedies minimized and missed, they also fail to account for the subtleties and nuances that result in vastly different end points from what appears to be a common beginning.

So call the Bombay attacks what they were: an attack on Bombay, not “India’s September 11″. Call the Satyam scandal what it is: a fraud perpetrated on Satyam investors and employees, not “India’s Enron”. It’s bordering on the insulting that the differences, the tragedies, the triumphs and the nuances are all shoveled under the carpet in the name of a soundbite.