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I have found western understanding lacking about India, and that extends from mainstream normies to academic intellectuals to even the denizens of the motte. The broad strokes surrounding a current or historical events are observed, and yet they end up with such a lopsided interpretation that makes my jaw drop. That includes both supporters and detractors. Part of it is because India is difficult to understand. It's diverse, it's complex, has a ton of history and just came out of a millennium where the populace's civilizational psyche was shattered. I just cannot stress enough how paradoxical this place is, where you would find extremes of everything. Though complexity in and of itself cannot block understanding, another equally important obstacle is how everything and anything the west learns about India is heavily through its elites.
I do not want to delve much in history, so I will keep it as brief as possible. The way the British operated in the Indian subcontinent was through vassal states(a few were under direct British rule), who were able to keep their titles though lost control of the state. To integrate India into the empire, they went around creating an education system centered around English as the second language to produce anglicized Indians who would serve as intermediary between Britain and India. In Thomas Macaulay, the implementor of this policy in its own words-
Limited educational opportunities meant that the ones who could enroll and receive an education were people with significant wealth or who could save such an amount. The children of the vassal states and elites of the elites would receive their education in the boarding schools modeled after the ones in Britain like Eton College. Eventually they would go on to study in Cambridge and Oxford, and those are the people who end up running India. Numerous leaders of the Indian Independence movement, the civil service, established industrialist all were London educated and by god were they English in tastes, opinions and morals. Especially the English left. No one exemplified this more than our first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. It came no surprise that India after Independence took such a large leftwards turn. One of the more major consequence of this is that holding views closer to the western left became a status symbol among the intelligentsia and the elites.
This group of elites were so cut off from the general populace that their lack of understanding of the Indian society and reckless policies kept backfiring at them. A lot of them well-meaning, the sheer arrogance of their confidence in their intellectual powers resulted in something reminiscent of the Soviet Union's excesses in the 30s. The License Raj which inhibited free enterprise was finally dismantled in the 1990s in face of economic reality and frankly speaking is the best thing that has happened to India since the Independence. But the leftward intelligentsia was able to maintain their control over the elites. Already a status symbol, being Westernized also became an economic necessity when a lot of capital flowing in from the west wanted to capitalize on the country's large English speaking educated labor market.
Why am I telling you all this? Because the most important thing you need to know about India is the huge inferiority complex the Indian identity has. We have baggage, lots of baggage. The last millennia wasn't kind to us, the brutality of Muslim and British rule was horrific and ironically that hangs as an albatross over our heads. I know a lot of people instinctively roll their eyes when they see the word "genocide" but for a lot of Hindus especially and Indians at large that's the feeling the previous millennia evokes. This in addition to the Westernization being a status symbol has resulted in a lot of Indians carrying a huge inferiority complex, especially towards the west. This is the reason for a lot of people in India prizing west as a migration destination in addition to the opportunity. Studying and settling in the west is still an enduring status symbol ever since the British Raj. You guys get most of your information about India from people who have internalized this world view. From this lens, any accomplishment in India must be gauged in comparison to current Western standards and zeitgeist. These are the people who in less flattering terms want to be white and see others without Western tastes, opinion and morals as inferior. Like it or not, these are the people who are primarily providing background information and happenings in the country. And they are just so cut-off from the general populace that there are a lot of things that they just don't understand why.
See I am long on India, and the way this top-level most prompted me to write this wall of the text as he also captured some strokes of reality and building a picture that I know to incomplete. There are loads of problems we face, casteism is still is a major issue, vested interests are blocking reforms and a populace whose ideal is to have job where you have no work and still get paid massive amount of money. But instead of bemoaning of the issues we have, we should consider whether they can be solved or not.
I am long on India because of two things that we have going for us-
A robust democratic system
A fairly competent political leadership
In an unstable world where major powers are dealing with one form of political crises or other, India has been relatively stable. Our inflation has held steady with the debt level under control. Relative to the world, we are in a much better economic position. Diplomacy wise, we are stationed comfortably in neither camp and have maintained our options. Modi, has shown will the will to push reform and is political astute enough to not sacrifice his grip on power for it. I don't see a chance of opposition to defeat him as their policies are just so ridiculously fucking the states that they are ruling (ex HP, Karnataka). I am betting on the fact that the labor and corporate law reforms would be pushed by the current government. If reforms are pushed, I do think that our own standards for not only labor skills and businesses but also behavior would improve.
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I don't know what to think about India. Similar to China, it is so populous that it is hard to generalize among the population, but even worse in that it's not predominantly Han Chinese. However, without any real understanding of how the castes shake out, I have noticed the vast majority of Indians I meet personally or professionally are of a few easily identifiable types.
The first is friendly, the nicest and kindest person you will ever meet. These will typically be found working in the lower end of the food industry, and are self-made. America's favorites. Will cook North Indian food because it's popular and widely accepted as Indian food the world over even if they're from Kerala.
The second is a kind of savant STEM genius, usually in mathematics and/or programming, the sort who has undergone rigorous levels of extremely strict education and gone far enough into it to see the universe in math. They are mildly autistic, strongly opinionated, and dismissive of others they see as less intelligent. Granted, this archetype shows up in many of a certain intelligence, but the frequency of encounters I have with them are enough evidence for me that this is a type.
The third is the layabout. They usually work as subcontractors, low-level developers or 24x7 tech support, the sort of people who you hear from when you've fought an extended battle with an automated hotline. They are frequently missing, partaking in India's many holidays, and may work alongside their relatives.
And finally, my least favorite and unfortunately the type I see the most in my current line of work. An arrogant, usually slightly or minimally overweight psychopath, utterly shameless, openly and proudly greedy and exploitative. The sort to penny-pinch by saving on gas masks for workers in an environment where there are hazardous leaks. This kind are highly successful and have often placed themselves at the top of any business hierarchy, usually in governance of the second and third types. They will waste months and months of time arguing over ways to save a few thousand dollars for themselves, perpetually overpromise and underdeliver while demanding the maximum from others. They will refuse any agreement or engagement in which they don't personally win in comparison to others. I have, no joke, been in a group discussion where they suggested, entirely seriously and as part of a requirements brief, implementing a worker tracking device that could administer electric shocks to their workers. The tech industry in India crawls with these people and they massively underpay their workers. When news broke about the organized scam call centers, I knew without a doubt that this kind of person is in charge, an enterprising sort who found a way to abuse the cheap labor of his fellow countrymen to extract profit.
My understanding of the reason why India is so badly off, aside from political gridlock, caste and religious politics, is that this last type has proliferated immensely at the expense of the others. They seek power and money like flies to shit. I have worked with people all over the world, and Indians are high up on the list of people I want to work with the least - this includes the Chinese, the Germans, and the Jews.
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Yeah the social-demographic situation precludes any serious achievements in my opinion.
There's a story apparently from a US sailor posted aboard an Indian warship - complete clown show (but good food): https://old.reddit.com/r/LessCredibleDefence/comments/9uwqzk/iama_us_naval_officer_who_spent_5_days_onboard/
Even the US is only a pale shadow of its former glory when it comes to competence. Look how long it's taking to get back to the Moon, consider how US warships have also been crashing because of inadequate training and general incompetence, magnified by DEI. But they're still well ahead of India.
It's a little bit like post-apartheid South Africa (but not nearly so bad in terms of visible decline). There is a smart fraction in South Africa. But they're not in power. The people in power are beholden to special interests, the machinery of government requires immense lubrication (corruption) just to sustain itself. There's no capacity for the kinds of intensive reforms needed to get things working again.
IMHO this is evidence of increased competence, not decreased. We spent hundreds of billions of (inflation-adjusted) dollars to develop the Apollo program, with a marginal cost of billions of dollars per mission, and because we prized speed over sustainability we had very little to show for it in the end besides expendable rockets we couldn't afford to keep using. Even SLS (at mere tens of billions of dollars to develop!) isn't that bad, and Starship HLS (a few billion NASA dollars, on top of a few more billions of private investment with an actual expected return and commercial use cases, with sub-billion-dollar marginal costs at worst) is an absolute bargain by comparison. The major flaw of Starship HLS is that high capabilities come with a high level of technical risk (though not quite as high as I thought it was before I watched the giant robot arms catch the decelerating megarocket on their first try...), and we're even mitigating that now with Blue Moon as backup. There's definitely some structural problems inherent to the way everyone always pretends to believe that this time the brand-new aerospace development programs won't be delayed, but we're at least getting something out of the delays.
I agree that going to the Moon then was a waste of time, a fundamentally ill-conceived PR stunt. But it was executed very well! They had to invent just about everything they needed, including computers. They faced far more constraints than the Artemis program in terms of materials, technology, doing things for the first time. However progress on Artemis has been very slow and not that cheap either.
$93 Billion has already been spent (in contrast to $200-250 billion on Apollo) and nobody is on the Moon, it doesn't seem that NASA has gotten any more efficient, despite enormous advancements in the last 60 years. SpaceX of course is a different story.
I think it's a little like consumer computer software. The hardware gets enormously more powerful but the software runs just as slowly due to shoddy practices and bloat piling up. There is no excuse for Microsoft Word to lag for several seconds as I load a 2800 KB document on a very fast PC but it does anyway!
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Would you marry a pretty and smart SC/ST girl?
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The bullish case for India is that it’s huge, almost certainly underperforming its potential, and population+location guarantees its going to be an important country for the foreseeable future, with important countries often having a way of attracting investment. It’s also seen economic growth recently. And unlike sub Saharan Africa, it has high-HBD groups living there even if the average is low, so India can come up with enough people to keep the lights on. Plus labor demand elsewhere in the world should benefit India because they’re pretty much perpetually going to be a low bidder.
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There were opinions polls where India was amongst very few countries where majority answered positively to question if it it's good to use genetic technology to improve future children intelligence...
Do you think it's wrong or irrelevant, or it's just Indians here have bias to answer "yes"?
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Even smarter and more homogeneous nations struggle a lot.
It took 40 years, untold billions of $ and much woe for Swedish nation to start thinking, collectively, maybe we shouldn't be importing refugees on a massive scale.
You could just refuse to identify as Indian and use caste & state or point out that India has the cultural and generic diversity of a continent, which it has. Even a normie should understand that. Ask him if he thinks Finns are the same as Italians perhaps . .
While I'm not going to defend Sweden's migration policy, I think you'd much rather be a victim of your own success (which is where progressivism comes from) than your failures.
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It seems that the US gets all the smart Indian immigrants, and the rank and file are inundating Canada and causing dire effects on the quality of life there.
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