THE NUMBERS GAME: HOW AMERICANS VIEW INDIA
How do Americans view India these days? Interest in such barometers of public opinion remains high, judging by the wide coverage in the Indian media. Image matters, more than ever apparently, in our globalized and media-saturated world. So here are the results from a poll conducted in February 2008.
The same poll found that not a lot of people have extremes of opinion—‘very favorable’ or ‘very unfavorable’—when it comes to India. For the ‘mostly favorable’ category, in fact, India’s score of 59 percent was second only to Germany’s (at 62 percent). In a separate poll this year, Indians seemed to be more optimistic about their country’s future than Americans were about theirs. And this was even before the current economic downturn in the States. “Perceptions of domestic economic conditions vary widely,” the BBC World Service poll states. “In ten countries, a majority perceives improvement (led by China 84%, Canada 72%, Australia 71%, UAE 69%, Russia 63%, and India 56%), while in twenty-one a majority perceives their country worsening (led by Italy 86%, the Philippines 76%, Indonesia 76%, USA 74%, and Portugal 72%).”
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