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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28109 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 18, 2023

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You got me. My contrarian ass came up with perfectly mirrored response to what I saw as an unreasonably negative knee-jerk reaction from OP.

It's weird. You'd think that an atheist who's seriously dating a white woman, plans to settle in the US and lives in one of the leftist-est zipcodes in the country would be doom-n-gloom about the current state of India.

But idk. I would have been a doom-n-gloomer if I hadn't spent my 4 undergrad years in a smaller town with a diverse population drawn from the lower rungs of society. Congress (Socialist) era India was a nightmare of proportions that my hyper-urban sheltered ass could barely phantom. Starting with the ideas of Vajpayee/Manmohan and finally, the agency of Modi to execute, things have started changing. Sanitation, direct-to-person Welfare delivery, bureaucrat accountability, on-time infrastructure projects....those little things have changed the lives of your average (cripplingly poor) Indian in unimaginable ways.

I remember you or someone else framing this as India implementing Woke policies way before anyone else in world while we are far from an economy that can even support such welfarism

I have phrased it as such before. There was a reason Nehru was chided as Vishwaguru. (Professor to the world). He should have become an Oxford professor. Would have been excellent for India and the life-expectancy of his progeny.

I do worry that India will move from a poor country with some economic significance due its large population to a somewhat poor country with not enough people or industry to be of any significance.

Mate, my veneer of optimism runs thin. Don't make me face the my true fears. I want to be an optimist. But, I agree with you. Being a cripplingly poor country with billion+ people is a terrible predicament to find yourself in. Especially when the worldwide TFR is dropping rapidly, and India while somewhat insulated, will inevitably see the same decline.

Finger's crossed ??

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