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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.
Yes. Assuming they managed to lose the maladaptive cultural baggage they developed. Which they do, at least in the West. Or they wouldn't be model minorities and the single richest ethnic group when it comes to average income in quite a few nations.
As I've previously explained to you, rich Indians do not particularly care about that. It's only when they're socialized in a place where that's expected that they put in the effort.
Being richer than 97.23% of our 100k gods, like Ambani, will buy you a sick skyscraper. It won't clean the streets outside. So you become rapidly inured to it and focus on the interior, which is both free from the Hoi Polloi, and also what your peers care about.
Most temples let anyone in who wants to enter. That puts a firm cap on how clean they can be when the average person isn't.
They have 10-20 IQ points on us. That counts for a lot. It takes a certain baseline level of intelligence for prosociality to really start paying dividends, leaving aside the other benefits of human capital.
Besides, the Indians in places like Guyana and Fiji are descendants of indentured laborers abandoned there by the Brits. They're not the same sampling as the average emigre to the US. I am under the impression they still spank the native populace, South Africa would be a pertinent example.
But it will clean the streets outside, friend. Google says Ambani is worth 97 billion dollars. Street cleaning is no arcane secret, many nations have essentially perfected it. The machines are readily sold by all the usual manufacturers. Salaries for manual laborers are very low. Training the local population is only a matter of hiring traffic and street wardens for a few years until the people get used to it. Google suggests the average Mumbai taxi driver makes about $3000 a year, and I suppose we can assume that street cleaners are unlikely to be paid much more. If the city objects, India is a corrupt enough place that the country’s richest man can bribe them. A guy worth $97bn can clean the streets outside his skyscraper, he can hire 10,000 men to do it by hand if he wants to (that would amount to what, a paltry $50m a year?), it’s absurd to discuss this banal issue solved in every developed country and even many poorer countries for much less money as some impossibility!
Downtown Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, even Jakarta (!) are so much cleaner than the wealthier parts of Mumbai or New Delhi. So is Windhoek. So are parts of Accra and Addis, even. What holds India back? It’s not some kind of upstanding socialist government insisting that the rich can’t do this; as the Adani reports showed, the government is clearly in the pocket of the billionaires, who are largely high IQ and high caste. The only explanation is lack of will, not among the peasants but among the rich.
And why should they bother, when they can travel abroad to their mansions in London or their penthouse in Singapore? But again, the rich Malaysians have those too, and they still work to make Kuala Lumpur a better place to live. I’m often criticized for my own elitism, but I don’t blame all of society’s problems on the poor in whose nation I share.
I asked almost this exact question to a (native) friend while living in Mumbai. We were driving past this dudes skyscraper and I asked him how people feel about the fact that this super rich guy has a skyscraper to live in but it’s surrounded by absolute filth and poverty. Isn’t he at least embarrassed?
He said it’s because of the Hindu belief in Karma and reincarnation. Basically: those people living outside of the skyscraper fucked up in a past life and this is their punishment. The rich did well and this is their reward.
Personally I would assume that cleaning the streets would be a karma earning thing to do. If I was rich and wanted to secure a good life next go around, cleaning the streets and helping the poor would be high on my list of priorities, but this could just be me assuming me own, Catholic, culture as the default. A little googling backs this up; among religions Christians are more charitable than Hindus (or Muslims): https://www.jstor.org/stable/41940751#:~:text=the%20relationship%20between%20religion%20and%20philanthropic%20behavior.,%2C%20Hinduism%2C%20and%20Buddhism).
Lol. Lmao. Maybe that's what your friend personally believes, but that's nowhere near representative of the actual reasons.
Rich people are usually tolerated by the poor pretty much everywhere (not that they have the power to change it).
Most Indians are firm believers in meritocracy, regardless of particular quibbles about corruption, nepotism and so on.
This explanation is just as daft as claiming that the reason why a struggling but pious redneck in the States doesn't burn down someone's McMansion is because he expects them to be equalized in Heaven.
Yeah I'm not a Hindu and admittedly know nothing about the culture. Some googling does seem to suggest that Hindus aren't particularly charitable, though.
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