Christmas 'curse' wrapped as a present

We have, with all grace and gratitude, mistaken it as a Christmas gift. The simple folks that we are, intent on always calling a spade a spade and never looking a gift horse in the mouth, we have failed to see it as a present irritatingly loaded with conditions and contradictions.

We rail and rant, and justifiably so, against the bias in the Western media. Yet when the Time's names "The Chinese Worker" as a runner-up for its Person of the Year award we break into song and dance. We sing paeans of praise for our workers, who have not figured in our cozy scheme of things for a couple of decades. Journalists, commentators and sundry other experts flood the traditional media outlets as well as the web with their esteemed views. Most of them, though, seem to have realized only now that hundreds of millions of our toiling brothers and sisters suffer in silence, while we, the privileged few, make hay in the sun that shines on the power generated by their sweat and blood.

It's an irony. It's an irony because we should be mourning, not celebrating, the Time's announcement. It's an irony because the Time has elevated Ben Bernanke above "The Chinese Worker".