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I've been thinking about Indians today. In my current management position in tech, I deal with a lot of Indians. On one hand, Indians are some of my most trusted colleagues and friends who I rely on who have a CS degree from a legit US college like University of Colorado Boulder or Ohio State. These people are the best and I love working with them. These are people who went to school in the US and are legit. Not only that, but my favorite two teachers in college in math and CS were both Indians who taught CS.
On the other hand, the Indians we hire as support are absolute trash. You compare them to Philipno or Eastern European people we hire as support, and they are so bad. The funny thing is that the Indians that are in the US are our best people for support. Obviously, there is a massive selection bias, but what the hell is going on with this?
I actually have a real world example. I worked at a telecom company as a software engineer and most of the managers were former Army or Air Force people. The majority of the people in the US who were doing support are/were Indian. But these people were Indians in America and everyone liked them and they all eventually got promoted. But the overnight people in India were again absolute trash.
What is going on in India with their leadership? Why are Indians so bad in India but ones that come hear and get a taste of American corporate structure so good? I know this is probably a best fit for the questions thread, but this legitimately puzzles me.
And obviously Indian-Americans I don't include in this. They are just like all other Americans.
In no other people is there the same extraordinary gap between the achievements of the diaspora and the abject squalor of the homeland.
And that, really, is the Indian Question. Are they an intellectual elite of fifty or a hundred million capable of Denmark-tier (or at least Israel-tier, let’s say) civilization were they not sadly chained to a billion 80 IQ commoners?
The problem with this narrative is that one would expect that at least, like white South Africans, the smarter Brahmins would have created some semblance of high civilization if only for themselves.
And yet as I have noted, even in wealthy parts of Delhi and Mumbai garbage piles in the streets, random cows and other animals stand around, and the exteriors of the homes of the rich often appear crumbling or at least unkept (even if the interiors are pristine). Even many temples, which one would assume would be highest priority for maintenance and cleanliness (as they are in every other religion) and which would presumably be the responsibility of the priestly caste are dirty or otherwise poorly kept, often despite a large contingent of priests and other staff.
The Indians can go to space for nationalist symbolism, but they cannot clean the Ganges, despite it being of central spiritual importance to their faith and the fact that they have had a Hindu nationalist government in power for a decade. I read this article about Varanasi which quotes a Brahmin priest, whose day job is a professor of engineering, who still drinks from the water each day despite knowing how contaminated it is by fecal matter, corpses and so on. A show of faith, certainly, but why must it even happen? Obviously this is a country that has enough engineers to clean the river. (They try, but it appears halfheartedly.)
What gives? Even when China was a poor communist shithole, places like Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan were rapidly developing, it wasn’t like you had to look hard in 1975 for evidence of Chinese achievement. But the Indian nations in the world - including diaspora nations in the Caribbean and the Pacific like Guyana and Fiji - all seem to suffer from similar issues.
I'm going to go out on a limb and blame colonialism, Yes, really.
There's much the same problem in Ireland. I've often grumbled that we have no sense of the built heritage; we're scrabbling around trying to create tourist spots based on very dodgy grounds (ancient east coast etc.) while we've permitted, or in many cases destroyed, the kind of heritage that would be attractive. Germany and other European countries have pretty little towns (or even cities) where the Old Traditional Buildings are the main attraction, hell even England manages to have the idea of the idyllic villages (where the murder rate is sky-high) as tourist bait.
We don't. We let our towns and cities collapse, and any new building was and is poor copies of Brutalist or modern architecture. 'Development' meant, in the 60s and 70s, knocking down the old buildings and selling on the sites for massive profits.
Part of it definitely is that the attitude was "we lived in thatched cottages when we were peasants without a pot to piss in, but we've moved on from that" since such housing was not seen as quaint 'cottagecore' but stark reminders of poverty and deprivation. In Dublin, the elegant Georgian terraces had become inner-city slums.
But part of it definitely also was because the British being in charge, and being the ones responsible for everything, down to the local landlords, took away initiative from the locals. You had no power to do anything for yourself, so you became used to not doing anything. Somebody else would make those decisions, decide what should and shouldn't be done, what should and shouldn't be repaired and in what manner.
(There's also the folk stories about not being too visibly striving and improving, as that would just jack up your rent; e.g. stories such as the tenant who saved up for years to afford to buy a fine new coat, and one day the agent/landlord himself sheltered in the cottage from a storm; the tenant proudly lent his new coat to the visitor, and the next day it was sent back with a note saying that if he could afford to dress that well he could afford to pay higher rent. The higher rent eventually meant eviction as no, he could not afford it).
Then we got independence, but the same old mindset prevailed: if the gate falls down, just tie it back on with bailing twine to the fencepost. Don't repair crumbing walls and ditches. Knock down, instead of preserving and repairing, the old architecture. Sure, it'll do. It's somebody else's business to worry about that.
I wonder if there is something of the same mindset in Indians post-the Brits? 'Not my job, not my place; someone else will make the decision' and 'oh well it's good enough'.
I don't believe this at all. We were never colonized in Sweden and the exact same thing happened.
Also the British in India (notably unlike Ireland) governed through local elites - they had to given that the Indian Civil Service only employed less than 8000 expats - so the idea that local elites lost their initiative due to the effects of British rule seems implausible.
Yeah. I've always found the movie Lagaan insane where they're holding up the existing monarchial despot as being oppressed by having a layer of British taxation on top of his feudalism. Like I understand in the movie the British are enforcing a brutal tax, but it's not like India having droughts and feudal taxation being harsh are some unique invention of the Anglo.
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Local elites were kept on a short leash; if you got any uppity notions about "hey this is our country and I should be governing on my own behalf, not as the puppet satrap of an overseas empire", you got swatted and the British government stepped in to take over and run the entire enterprise directly, instead of letting a trading company do it.
Yes but in a lot of the satraps the previous running of affairs prior to the British was also some flavor of being a Satrap to the Mughals, Maratha or whoever the hell else. And if you were a peasant it didn't make a huge lick of difference who exactly held the reins of power on account of said reins being about 14 social classes above where you were.
I've got a few friends of very upper-caste Indian extraction, and the complaints about the Raj always rang somewhat hollow to me as the vibe was always very 'For a century there we were only the 2nd highest rung of the ladder, and lived lives of luxury that were somewhat obliged to Anglos' ilk whilst trying to uplift the grievances of commoners as being somehow related to their great grandfather who was the vice-chief minister of Commerce for Bombay and dined mightily off his servants.
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That's true of all management all the time. If a mid-level line manager gets uppity motions about 'this is my factory and I should be governing on my own behalf, not as a puppet of the CEO', he or she is going to get smacked down. Despite this, different companies/orgs allow very different levels of initiative at lower levels.
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