Brainstorming on India

[Canoe_Captain]

I am preparing a presentation about the socio-economic landscape of India for the FDR YouTube channel. It's going to be an overview of the positives, the negatives and a future forecast based on current trends.

 

I would like to cover relevant and interesting topics. What are your thoughts on India? I am interested in your first spontaneous thoughts:

 

· What’s interesting?

· Impressions

· Stereotypes

· Weaknesses

· Strengths

 

The video is going to be part of a series which includes already the USA, Australia, the UK and Canada

 

 

[Tony]

I have an Indian passport, I guess that makes me Indian.

 

Lived there for the first 7 years of my life. I now live in a country with a majority of the population being expat Indians. I know a lot about the mentality.

 

Very briefly as I need to run,

·  What’s interesting?

New farmer seems to be business friendly, i.e. big business friendly

·  Impressions

Would love to do business there if I could open a company in less than 6 months and without bribing anyone.

·  Stereotypes

Very similar psycho class as Russia (Mother India)

·  Weaknesses

One of the worst places in the world to be a child.

Kids are openly beaten, threatened abused in public. Hitting your kids is not looked down on at all. This alone tells me that India is at least two generations away from being where the US is today (psycho class wise). 

·  Strengths

Moving away from its socialist/communist upbringing, one step at a time, slowly. The economic reforms that sparked the livability of India today was masked in socialist propoganda terms called "Liberalization" in the 90s.

 

Milton Friedman did an episode on India in his series Free To Choose, it would be very useful for your research even though it is quite old.

[GRosado]

The Free to Choose episode was Vol. 2 or 3 & it was called Tyranny of Control

[Canoe_Captain]

Milton Friedman did an episode on India in his series Free To Choose, it would be very useful for your research even though it is quite old.

 

The Free to Choose episode was Vol. 2 or 3 & it was called Tyranny of Control

 

Thank you for your input. I am going to look at it.

[Sumeet]

My parents are from India. I was actually born in Mumbai, but my parents moved to the US when I was about 6 months old. I've been back to visit 4 times, and have also intermittently spoken with relatives who have visited the US. The times I visited when I was younger, there was a definite sense of "backwardness", so to speak. Cows and buffalo would still be seen in urban streets. Bicycles were extremely common. Almost all cars on the road were either Fiat 1100s or Hindustan Ambassadors (both massively outdated versions of 1950s European cars that were still being produced decades later in India). Computer technology, even among my fairly well-off relatives, was a couple generations behind the west. Cheap consumer goods were either not available or poorly-made by some local company, because foreign competition was forcibly excluded.

 

The last time I visited, there were many changes. The automobile market had diversified massively. Cheap, outdated electronics were still readily available, but the latest devices were available too, if you could afford them. Streets still exhibited the disorganization typical of third-world streets, but were now filled mostly cars and motorcycles. Familiar brands like Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Chevrolet, and Levi's were all over the place. Back in the early 1990s, an uncle who has owned a construction business for many years, was pretty wealthy for an Indian guy. Following economic liberalization and the subsequent construction boom, he's now flat-out rich... like, it's no big deal for him to spend $150,000 on a new car even though already has 5. A few other relatives engaged in entrepreneurial pursuits have also had considerable success, though not necessarily to that level of wealth.Other impressions... there's still a lot of patriotism among older generations, and a decided reverence for figures like Gandhi and Nehru (and a corresponding distaste for Pakistan). But I get the sense this has waned a fair bit among younger people. There is a certain sense of discord, or at least lack of a common vision or identity, as India doesn't have the same type of cultural history of say, China or Korea, which perhaps allowed centralized totalitarianism to take hold more easily in those places. If you examine the history of the subcontinent, it's largely one of fractured kingdoms and city-states over thousands of years. The idea of a single, unified India was in many ways brought about by the British, with their maps and railroads and centralized administration. The Indian "freedom" movement of the 1920s onward took this notion to heart and ran with it. Today, India is widely recognized as one of the most corrupt countries. For example, in many cases, bribery isn't even disguised by a cover of politics... it's just flat out handing some bureaucrat a stack of cash. But a lot of people are still locked into the idea that they're "free" because their oppressors are in New Delhi instead of London. I imagine lots of people in the US had similar notions in the early 1800s about no longer being ruled from London, but perhaps cynicism grows as those early generations die? I don't know, maybe.

 

There's also a lot of religious uniformity and conformity. Though international news sometimes carries stories of violence between hindus and muslims, there are many areas where hinduism is almost ubiquitous, to the point where people will just assume you're hindu unless there's some clear indication that you aren't. The last time I was there, the topic came up a few times, and older relatives seemed surprised that I wasn't hindu, whereas younger relatives didn't seem surprised or shocked, although they still defined themselves as hindu. Thinking back on it, I think chances are very high that if my parents had remained in India instead of moving to the US, I would be among those people who just accepted the popular propaganda and considered myself hindu by default, without really even thinking about it. Whereas growing up in New York and New Jersey, I was never exactly exposed to an explanation of rational atheism, but observing the variety of religions in a mixed society, I was able to come to the conclusion when I was 11 that none of them were for me. I can't imagine having been in a position to do that if I had grown up in India.

 

Also, lots of middle and upper class younger people are as technologically savvy as anyone anywhere in the world. But socially, I agree with Tony... acceptance of violence towards children seems to be decidedly greater. I know this varies among different social groups anywhere in the world, but even my upper-class relatives seem to be OK with it. I mean, I don't know most of them very well, as I've only met most of them a few times in my life, but I've seen threats of slaps or hits leveled against "misbehaving" children as if it were a matter of course (I don't recall seeing them carried out though, at least not while I present to witness it). From that perspective, it's actually surprising that I was not hit as a child. But overall, the mentality around hitting children still seems to be a bit backwards. Also, I don't have any personal experience of lower-class villages where hundreds of millions still reside, but I imagine it's even more prevalent there.

 

I suppose, like much of the former "third world", there's really a mix of old and new. Islands of spectacular wealth juxtaposed with scenes of crushing poverty. But there are perhaps some encouraging signs of a dynamic middle class emerging between those extremes... a group of people who in the west seem to be increasingly strangled by debt, regulation, and theft.