Despande - Brandon

Shekhar Deshpande, in article "The Confident Gaze", he questions the ethics instituted by the National Geographic magazine. Deshpande states that some of the pictures in the magazine are only designed to make you happy, and not realize what is going on in the world. He claims "[i]t is as if that world needs to be posed in the appropriate way to the Western observer, he could not see it in its bare essentialities"(Deshpande), meaning that as Americans, or westerners in general, we aren't prepared to deal with the horrors of the third world. We do not want to see what is happening in the world, in its true form, and what we could be if he hadn't "marched" toward civilization. According to Deshpande, National Geographic believes "Human suffering becomes worth a good image", in that the poor living conditions of other countries, sometimes is only a money maker to them.