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His rant isn't really about laziness though. Laziness is not what causes people to prioritize "prom queens" and "jocks". Indeed, the prom queen and the jock are examples of excellence in their own fields, that being maintaining physical beauty + good social status and athletic prowess. And what he further gets wrong is thinking these things are somehow anti-correlated with the things he would personally like to see popularize like "math olympiad champ" and "valedictorian", while in America they are not. Perhaps if he were more in tune with real American culture he wouldn't be buying into left wing movie tropes as indicative of real life. But here, in the real world, you can be prom queen and get a 1500 on your SAT and maintain a quality GPA (whatever that means in 2025 is not something I know, when I went to HS 4.0 was still considered exceptional, but grade inflation has probably changed that). In the real world you can win a science competition while making all conference or all state on the football team (or in my case winning a regional title in an individual sport).
Indeed, if we drill down into Vivek's screed, it is simply self serving ignorance. It was a bunch of jocks, who happened to also be brilliant, who ran the British Navy as it established an empire that easily subjugated Vivek's people, and Americans of the same ilk then won the world wars and beat back communism (which, again, Indians thought was really cool). But he attacks things he does not know, and/or cannot compete on (and in fact many other Indians tend to struggle in these realms as well). No mention of his sporting in his background, and we would expect from his rant he was not prom king. Indians as a whole struggle with athletics, having the lowest Olympic medals/capita of any large nation.
And is there a laziness problem? Yes, but it is not some problem with Prom Queens failing to cram in a dozen extra problem sets a day so they can get their SAT score from a 1400 to a 1450, and its not because some jock does a half ass job on some meaningless homework assignment given to him by an overeducated English teacher who couldn't get with the jock she liked when she was in HS. No, its the stoners and the antisocial kids that need to be reformed, but since Vivek buys into the Hollywood high school myths of dumb jock and repressed genius that gets shoved into lockers he doesn't have any real applicable solutions. Instead he has a dumb rant against the very great things about America that cause America to put every other country into the metaphorical locker.
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