Western Universalism - what's the big deal?

[member_22733]

Taking on modern Science and Commerce...hmm, now that's a different story. That starts to feel more like a "Losers of the world, Unite" message being put out.

If this is the message you are getting from this thread, I feel rather sad.

Modern Science is a tool, just like agriculture of yesteryear and hunting spear before that time. How you use it, how you morph it depends on you and your understanding of the problem you are trying to solve. If you don't understand the problem you are faced with, there is a high likelihood that you will not be able to solve it with the tools you have, no matter how great they are.

[Pulikeshi]

Definitions don't give you knowledge, they only tell you a convention for how a word is to be used. ....

You nailed it - albeit, it takes quite a bit to come to this conclusion.

Don't know if my take is similar or different, you think it is "declaration" versus "convention" - thought?

Consider a brief example - a metro dweller wants to become an Amazon tribal, there is no "declaration" she can read to
achieve such a status. Living with the tribals for a while, perhaps as an omega, made fun of, etc. she sees that there are
some members who hunt, some track and read stars, some poison the arrows, so gather water, fruits and vegetables, some
bear children, etc. All these activities happen by convention, there is no overt declaration of belief or function.
Eventually, one day she becomes a valuable member of the tribe by taking on a useful function and playing a role...

Now lets say the Amazon tribal dude has to owe allegiance to a democratic nation-state, or organized religion,
write a scientific paper, become a doctor, etc. almost all these activities need adherence to a declaration of one sort or an
other. Mostly, two sort of things can then occur, irrespective of the truth of the declared truth claim, the tribal can
become a true believer and follower or be a bad believer and follower.

The tribal now goes back to his original condition and tries to make the tribe conventionally declarative!

[Pulikeshi]

Just a quick note on thread direction etc.

1. The West has shaped the world (more so than others) for the last several hundred years. A whine fest against the West only
   says a lot about the prejudices of the person whining, much less about the West or WU.
2. If SD needed no course correction, it would not have been defeated by the colonizing powers from Eurasia, then the first step
   is to accept that several things are broken before it can be fixed.
   1. If above is true, then it makes no sense to create the "other" version of SD merely because of the last few hundred years
   2. That said, incorporating what was learned by the West in the last few hundred years is not slavery or defeat
3. If anything positive can come out of this thread, it is not so much showing WU as bunkum, but learning and
   incorporating the positive experiences and learning and adopting it into an SD framework

Can WU be digested by SD? burp?!

[KrishnaK]

Indian society as a whole over the last thousand or more years has had more of a 'live and let live' attitude compared to either the West or Islam.

That is a very believable claim. Given the ratio of arable land/landmass compared to anywhere else in the world, India was the richest place on earth for over a thousand years. There was no reason to be rapacious. That though is not reason enough to claim that today Indians are not as desirous of wealth as the west and more altruistic. The sole reason, if you had only read the history behind my argument, was to point out that for a doctor to claim Indians are not as desirous of wealth/altruistic is pure manure, given what the gatesfoundation alone does in India. It does so solely because there are lots of Indians whose needs are not being catered to.

[member_22733]

Just a quick note on thread direction etc.

1. The West has shaped the world (more so than others) for the last several hundred years. A whine fest against the West only
   says a lot about the prejudices of the person whining, much less about the West or WU.
2. If SD needed no course correction, it would not have been defeated by the colonizing powers from Eurasia, then the first step
   is to accept that several things are broken before it can be fixed.
   1. If above is true, then it makes no sense to create the "other" version of SD merely because of the last few hundred years
   2. That said, incorporating what was learned by the West in the last few hundred years is not slavery or defeat
3. If anything positive can come out of this thread, it is not so much showing WU as bunkum, but learning and
   incorporating the positive experiences and learning and adopting it into an SD framework

Can WU be digested by SD? burp?!

Exactly! This is not about whining about the west. Understanding WU and understanding what ails India can result in reconciling everything into an effective solution that can very well be based in SD. The fragmented jigsaw we now live in will hopefully merge into a united framework.

[KrishnaK]

Welcome to Sanatan Dharma.

Oh wait, the hindus have claims on universality too ?

[shiv]

Bottomline is, India HAS to focus on success in Science, education and commerce. There are no two ways about it. Pretty much what China is doing right now.

Arjun, the demand for the application of certain universal values is actually a hindrance in some ways even if it is beneficial in many other ways.

Let me stick to my "Clean the Ganga" example.

Rights like freedom and the right to life include the freedom to defecate as one has always done. It is the defecation near the river that causes pollution, but you cannot stop people from defecating. Building toilets is a good idea, but water supply has to be available for those water sources and a separate sewage collection and disposal system.

The Ganga has over 200 million people living on its basin. The "Universal" right for water is 50 liters per human per day. That means 1 billion liters (1 cubic kilometer) of water per day over the Ganga basin needs to be purified for human use per day. Multiply that by 10 for effluents from industry and rainwater. Decontamination and treatment of such volumes of water will require thousands of sewage treatment plants. Each of these plants requires a small area of land. But the land around the Ganga is all owned by someone or the other. The government can grab the land and displace people, but that would not be consonant with universal rights like right to justice. So the issue goes to the courts. Given the current system, speeding up the court process is not going to happen.

The point I am getting at is that at some stage, "Universalism" has to be discarded for pragmatism.

If the Ganga needs cleaning up, should we shut down industries, or coerce people to build toilets on pain of punishment? Ideally the industries have to be forced to meet pollution standards. Typically that means world bank loans or foreign direct investment and a financial burden. More often, the government official takes a bribe and lets the industry off while the people are blamed for shitting too much.

None of this means that it cannot be done. But to do it with consensus and mutual agreement will take time. Doing it quickly like China - by coercion is unlikely to happen in India. And China seems to have botched things in many ways as well. But ultimately we will have to ignore some universal values to get to where we need to go from where we are. Since certain universal values are being foisted on us for commercial and non Indian political reasons - those values are the ones we must reject or ignore at least for a while.

[A_Gupta]

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
This thread really, has one and only one purpose. To demonize someone else. It is like a drug, that we constantly need, so that we can continue to live in denial, like an addict, without having to face up to the innumerable problems we face of enormous proportions.

Since Shiv started this thread based on a question from me, I can frankly say that my purpose was not and is not to demonize anyone. Of course, there are other participants on the thread, I cannot tell you all their purposes.

The West is a set of particular cultures. They have their good sides and their bad sides. But they are neither the desired nor the inevitable destiny of mankind. Indians have to wake up and seek their own future, that will sustain civilization in India.

BTW, there was a calculation I saw - if you take the sustainable amount of carbon dioxide release the Earth can sustain, and divide it by the world's population, you get a per capita sustainable carbon dioxide release. It is about 1.7 tons per person per year. As of 2010 or so, India's per capita co2 emissions was below this level. India need not be the problem that the China and the US pose to the Earth. But time is short.

It does sometimes seem like we lose what was good about us, and adopt what is bad about the West.
But do read through this:
http://www.hipkapi.com/2011/02/28/negat ... angadhara/


Excerpt:

Imagine, if you will, that Indian culture is an entity and that all Indians are its members. Imagine too that one day, it realized that it was not sure any more about the nature of the world it inhabited: What should it be doing? What is its place? How should it adapt? What does adaptation consist of? The only way it can ever find answers to these questions is through experimentation: trying out this or that strategy, growing new things as and when needed. Only its members can help of help; they are the ones to experiment with. Let us agree not to ask further questions about how this culture came to this realization and that we do not dispute about dating this event: India’s independence from the British. Thus, this entity, the Indian culture, takes to massive experimentation telescoping, in this process, events of many decades elsewhere into a single decade (and sometimes even less) in its history. Let us chronicle these experiments.

First, it takes to ‘socialism’: ‘Nehruvian’ socialism, the socialism of Lohia, the socialist attempts of the communist parties of India. Just as these experiments take-off, this culture starts exploring their limits even before a new generation is born: the Naxalites and the ML movement in Bengal impact India’s youth in different parts of India and both socialisms (of Lohia and of Nehru) begin to crack under the pressure of events even as, in the late 60′s, people elsewhere in the world begin to discover ‘student power’. Many activist youth groups emerge in different parts of India, born outside the existing left, but already radicalized. Just as these groups appeared to run out of steam, the Indian culture paused, and as though considering, plunges into another massive experimentation: ‘Dalit’ movement, ‘secessionist’ movements, which pits not the bourgeoisies against the proletariat but groups against each other. Even as these impact the culture, through ‘reservation policies’ and contraction of the living space for some of India’s children, a new experimentation begins: it is time for ratha yatra and Babri Masjid. This experimentation still continues and as it does, this entity launches yet another with no parallels in human history: the Indian culture sends two or more millions of its members to America. This is no exodus, much less of an exile, even if these members insist on speaking of the ‘Diaspora’.

3. What has Indian culture found out through all these experiments? Some of India’s children still continue with these experiments; some have ceased doing so. This means either some answers are no answers at all or at best, partial ones. Is India ‘socialist’? Or is she the proletariat? Or, perhaps, the landless peasant? Is she the ‘Dalit’, or merely the ‘woman’? Has she always been a Sikh, a Tamil or a Marathi, and never a single entity? Is she a ‘Hindu’, a Muslim or merely ‘secular’?

India, it appears, has been interrogating herself through all these experiments: who is she? This is no third-rate ‘identity politics’ of the post-colonials taught in Chicago or Columbia, but the strivings of a culture. We, her children, express this striving as well. Whatever our individual motives, whatever our individual biographies, today, on this thread, we too are asking the same question: what is it to be an Indian?

4. Much like her, we cannot reject the past: without it, we are not who we are any more. Nor could we turn our back to the present: that is where we have to live. Our cultural past must be made to talk in the language of the present: that, I have discovered, is the task for the future. At this moment, however, we need to become aware that we are asking this question and that the answer matters to each one of us. That is why we should be bothered about carrying out the task I spoke of.

What is involved in accomplishing this task? Here too the answer is simple: a collective effort. What does such an effort entail? I can share the results of my reflections on my experience in pursuing this task for nearly two decades now.

5. The first step, quite obviously, calls for spreading awareness about the nature of western representations of India. This entails that we find (a) people willing not only to challenge the western ‘scholars’, where and when they give talks in public forums about India etc. but also (b) speakers from the Indian community in the US, who try actively to supplant these ‘scholars’.

This requires that such speakers are continuously fed with literature of two sorts: (a) a debunking kind; and (b) the sort which provides new and novel conceptualizations of many aspects of the Indian culture itself.

This suggests that a serious and systematic research must be undertaken by many different people on many different themes. My knowledge of the intellectual scene tells me that there are very few such people. So, one has to look at recruiting younger, gifted people into doing research.

For this to happen, we need three things: (a) an intellectual visibility and respectability for this kind of research so that fine, younger minds are attracted: (b) a reward system that makes it worthwhile for them to pursue such a research for a decade at least; (c) a training in not only doing such research, but also help in publishing them in highly visible journals so that they can then go on to populate chairs in the academia.

[ramana]

Krishna K do you want to contribute or continue to troll? Let us know and we will make it eays for all of us.

[shiv]

If the right to a water source gives you a minimum "universal" requirement of 50 liters per day, does the right to equality mean that everyone must get his consumption down to 50 liters per day so that those who are getting 10 liters a day can get more?

Should we curb consumers who use 500 liters a day because others have less then 50 liters per day? Or would that be derided as "socialism" since the ideal is capitalism?

[A_Gupta]

The Ganga has over 200 million people living on its basin. The "Universal" right for water is 50 liters per human per day. That means 1 billion liters (1 cubic kilometer) of water per day over the Ganga basin needs to be purified for human use per day.

Funny, I was arguing on a New York Times forum that some rights do not scale. In the NYT case, it was about the ban on phosphate-containing detergents that causes dangerous algal blooms in water bodies. To paraphrase, some ecosystem may be able to support a lakh of people being lax about waste disposal or phosphate-detergents. The same ecosystem may be seriously perturbed and degraded when that number is one crore.

This was the trigger:

Erick Erickson of Red State:

Washington State has turned its residents into a group of drug runners — crossing state lines to buy dish washer detergent with phosphate. At what point do the people tell the politicians to go to hell? At what point do they get off the couch, march down to their state legislator’s house, pull him outside, and beat him to a bloody pulp for being an idiot? At some point soon, it will happen.

This is the kind of libertarian idiot that so many desis become after reading the works of Ayn Rand. If Washington State had one-tenth of the population that it does, probably then people using detergent with phosphate would likely be a non-issue. But one learns about the Rights of Man, and on top of that, extreme individualism; and then regulation becomes an ideological wrong.

[shiv]

Funny, I was arguing on a New York Times forum that some rights do not scale. In the NYT case, it was about the ban on phosphate-containing detergents that causes dangerous algal blooms in water bodies. To paraphrase, some ecosystem may be able to support a lakh of people being lax about waste disposal or phosphate-detergents. The same ecosystem may be seriously perturbed and degraded when that number is one crore.

The problem with all human communication is the possibility that a statement once put down is misread unless qualified by 10,000 words, which then won't be read. That happens a lot in this thread.

The difference between a lakh of people next to a river and a crore is modern development based on modern values. For 5000 years the population around the Ganga did not rise above a few tens of millions because there was plenty of death and suffering. Cholera, plague, typhoid etc were taking people as fast as babies were produced.

When death and disease are reduced by some mechanism, populations rise and put demands on the environment. That environmental degradation will come and bite us.

All solutions are energy intensive and we simply have to reserve the right to squeeze out as much energy as we need and not be held down by others and pay for the pollution they created. The alternative is to let people get disease and die and let the population decline. But that is not going to happen anytime soon.

[A_Gupta]

Let me begin with the event that colonialism is. To most of us, including the colonizers, this event appears to have taken the status of a historical proof of the cognitive superiority of one culture against the other. That is, for some reason or the other, we look at colonization as though it was a contest between twotheories much like, say, the contest between the Aristotelian theory and that of Galileo. Our colonization by the British is seen to express the weakness of our culture and, by the same token, their superiority.

However, the above perception does not emerge from a scientific study of either colonialism or imperialism but from the rhetorical force of another question: “if colonization is not an expression of our weakness, what else is it? An expression of our ‘strength’?” Even though every historian can routinely assure us that ‘higher’ civilizations can be conquered and overrun by ‘barbarians’, the so-called ‘scientific’ studies into our history do not appear to have moved away from this rhetorical question. On the contrary. Such studies try to provide ‘insights’ into our weakness, and tell us what the latter were. Simply put: the consensus (more or less) of all and sundry is that colonialism expressed the ‘weaknesses’ of the colonized and the ‘strengths’ of the colonizer. The industrial revolution in the West that antedates colonialism and the origin of the natural sciences that predates colonialism have somehow become telescoped in the popular consciousness into one state of affairs: the scientific, technological and the military might of the western culture. In short, colonialism expresses the civilizational superiority of the West. And, of course, the obverse of this conviction is: in many ways (in all ways?) we are inferior to the western culture. (The ‘we’ picks out the Indian culture here.) This conviction expresses itself in a variety of forms: from the rigidly nationalistic framework to its diametrically opposed stance. Provocatively put: colonialism is seen as a contest between two theories; one has won out proving the other as false (or passé) thereby.

The above stance (conviction, attitude, call it what you will) generates two antithetical intellectual movements. (It is a kind of a pendulum swing during the course of the last two hundred years we are not rid of yet.) The first is a fiercely ‘nationalistic’ mode. It claims that the Indian culture had everything: from quantum physics to psychoneuroimmunology, and from the rockets to the nuclear bombs. It further claims that there is nothing wrong either with ‘the caste system’ or with the Indian ‘religions’. The second is its antithesis: it brands any attempt to interrogate the Indian traditions and the Indian culture in order to recover and understand our current experiences as ‘obscurantist’ if not downright ‘fascist’. It believes that the current state of our society clearly shows the need for: ‘abolishing’ the caste system because it is the cause of social injustice; ‘reforming’ the Indian ‘religions’ so that they become more responsive to the needs of the modern day world; ‘establishing’ more firmly a ‘secular state’ that guarantees the upholding of the liberal values, etc. Between these two extremes, there are a number of opinions (of various shades) that tell us that we should ‘absorb’ the best from both cultures. However, these shades have been cognitively uninteresting so far.

There is, however, a third participant in this debate today. Standing outside the spectrum defined by these two antithetical movements, this voice suggests that both the responses are fundamentally colonial in nature. It suggests further that both ways of talking are obfuscating the nature of our experiences. It says that the Indians today have difficulties in accessing their own experiences, and that their learnt ways of talking about their culture and society are responsible for this state of affairs. It tries to argue that one needs to break out of the centuries of descriptive straightjacket that confines our thoughts and distorts our experiences. It is, I believe, a voice of the future which pleads the case for an Indian Renaissance. I hope to make plausible why this voice is believable and is worthy of credence.

http://www.hipkapi.com/2011/03/02/on-co ... angadhara/

[A_Gupta]

The difference between a lakh of people next to a river and a crore is modern development based on modern values. For 5000 years the population around the Ganga did not rise above a few tens of millions because there was plenty of death and suffering. Cholera, plague, typhoid etc were taking people as fast as babies were produced.

When death and disease are reduced by some mechanism, populations rise and put demands on the environment. That environmental degradation will come and bite us.

I disagree. The world experience is that industrialization leads to a slow-down and even zero-growth of population. India's problem is that its industrial revolution was greatly delayed due to being colonized. Suppose India begun a century earlier, the population would be much smaller now and the pressure on land and water due to sheer numbers would be less. The pressure due to increased energy use and so on would be more - but India would be less densely populated than Europe and could be just as clean or more.

Now with 1.2 billion people, the situation is certainly different.

PS: If India had followed the Japanese trajectory, starting 1870, then the 2014 population of India would be about 3 times the Indian population of 1870 instead of about 7-7.5 times.

[shiv]

For many thousands of years, populations around the world lived like animals in the sense that death rates matched birth rates. If there was more food more babies were born, but disease and injuries took away people to keep populations from growing beyond a point.

For a while in the history of the world, it was possible to migrate or conquer other lands creating misery for someone else, so that your own could have enough food. It is only after the advent of public health and vaccination on a widespread scale that human populations grew exponentially. That is where we are now.

Now let me ask some ethical questions - I am simply asking - I don't have the answers. If your society is miserable from disease and death and you have the solution via public health and vaccination, you apply it on your own society and let them gain the benefits.

But what gives you the motivation for applying the same public health and vaccination to other societies? Why not simply let them die from disease and dirty water supply? In case case of disease like smallpox or polio, that could spread from other societies to your society, it is important to force that other society to adopt solutions. But what about other things that are unlikely to spread? If the other society had little water supply and water related disease, let them stay that way. let them die, as long as it's no skin off your nose.

In fact - if you take a society and make it adopt your values and give them clean water supply and immunity to childhood diseases. that society proliferates so much that there is overpopulation. Then there is a shortage of fuel and water, and pollution of the environment leading to a new set of diseases. Now you have to figure out ways of stopping that degradation and fighting those new diseases.

One possible answer, as Ulan Batori pointed out in a humorous post, is commerce. Demand that the other society meet your standards saying you are happier, and when they try, help them along for some payment. What if societies turned around and said "Balls. We won't meet the standards you set. God gave us polio and we want polio"?

Just a ramble. Not a solution to anything.

[shiv]

I disagree. The world experience is that industrialization leads to a slow-down and even zero-growth of population.

This in fact was not known till it started happening in the west. It was an occurrence that was not predicted. Even in the west, zero growth is mainly in Europe and Japan. Not in America. To me, personally, it is not clear that this will happen in every society because for that to happen societies have to take up all the norms that western societies did. if they take up some and refuse others - the outcome may be different

[ShauryaT]

Taking on modern Science and Commerce...hmm, now that's a different story. That starts to feel more like a "Losers of the world, Unite" message being put out. Bottomline is, India HAS to focus on success in Science, education and commerce. There are no two ways about it. Pretty much what China is doing right now. Get your GDP back to where it was in a relative scale, lead the world in research output, keep increasing education and skill levels of the population. WU, as somebody mentioned earlier, is all about economics. The winner gets the right to preach.

The Mantra of focus on success is something that Indians as individuals and communities excel in - time for the country to adopt the same principle.

If you use the someone else's criteria to define "success" we shall never reach it - at least not based on how we are. We would have to transform to become who they are to reach levels of "success" as defined by them, based on their evolution and experiences. It inevitably entails adopting their culture, their values, their systems, their principles to reach their goals. This is what Mao - a Chinese nationalist sought to do - but in the process has severely wounded Chinese civilization. Deng Xiaoping could not have been "successful" as the "west" looks at success without the cleanup that Mao enabled. Where China goes from here, we shall see. This is what most NRI's have done. This is what the DIE is. This is what some of our so called Hindu nationalists seem to be doing too. The western system is what we follow in India. Our definitions of a successful life works on different factors and vectors than a clean separation of the spiritual from the temporal. While we have been severely mauled, raped and pillaged to the extent that many or most Indians no longer even acknowledge our principles, goals and values and our own definitions of what would entail "success" for an individual or a group or a nation.

If you want their kind of success, you will not be able to achieve it with the ways of our civilization. Now, now, someone please do not jump at me and say Hindus do not want wealth et al. That is not what I am saying. If Arjun would have said, Arthic success is to be attained within the framework of Dharma, it takes on a whole different meaning goals, principles and systems. Their definition of success is not equal to ours is at the heart of not accepting their definitions of universalism.

[ShauryaT]

I disagree. The world experience is that industrialization leads to a slow-down and even zero-growth of population.

This in fact was not known till it started happening in the west. It was an occurrence that was not predicted. Even in the west, zero growth is mainly in Europe and Japan. Not in America. To me, personally, it is not clear that this will happen in every society because for that to happen societies have to take up all the norms that western societies did. if they take up some and refuse others - the outcome may be different

Agree, with your post Shiv ji that how some societies react to industrialization is not completely known. But since a large part of this industrialization accompanies with western values and systems and mores, these trends have an impact even in Arab lands. On America, the population growth is skewed due to immigration rates. The birth rate amongst non-immigrant whites matches western Europe rates.

[Arjun]

If you use the someone else's criteria to define "success" we shall never reach it - at least not based on how we are. We would have to transform to become who they are to reach levels of "success" as defined by them, based on their evolution and experiences. It inevitably entails adopting their culture, their values, their systems, their principles to reach their goals.

The focus on 'success' I had mentioned - was subject to remaining who you are on the social, spiritual and moral planes. Maybe that did not come across explicitly to those who read it.

Overseas PIOs, by and large, have been relatively successful in 'Being Different' on these fronts (especially in comparison to other ethnic groups including the Chinese), while remaining highly competitive in material achievement. I would go so far as to say that Indic religions are not only compatible with Science and pursuit of (legitimate) wealth - but in many ways actively facilitate these goals, more so than perhaps Christianity or Islam. Its no wonder that the outcomes between Jains and Muslims remain starkly different on so many levels.

So - yes, Artha is subject to Dharma (in the individual case) and Rajdharma (in the nation's case). Having said that, Dharma / Rajdharma are not deontological precepts. So really practically ANYTHING can be justified as Dharma in the appropriate circumstances. To me it seems that the process is more important - that every action is necessarily justified through the Dharmic prism. Dharma sometimes involves prioritization among competing 'rights' or 'duties' - and that is a call that each decision-maker needs to make. As the Mahabharata shows, even war is justified as long as the cause can be justified in Dharmic terms.

[A_Gupta]

I disagree. The world experience is that industrialization leads to a slow-down and even zero-growth of population.

This in fact was not known till it started happening in the west. It was an occurrence that was not predicted. Even in the west, zero growth is mainly in Europe and Japan. Not in America. To me, personally, it is not clear that this will happen in every society because for that to happen societies have to take up all the norms that western societies did. if they take up some and refuse others - the outcome may be different

America grows because of continued immigration.

Technological society requires increased investment by families in their children. So they tend to have fewer.

[shiv]

how some societies react to industrialization is not completely known. But since a large part of this industrialization accompanies with western values and systems and mores, these trends have an impact even in Arab lands. On America, the population growth is skewed due to immigration rates. The birth rate amongst non-immigrant whites matches western Europe rates.

Technological society requires increased investment by families in their children. So they tend to have fewer.

In fact none of the studies or refs I have seen about reduction in the birth rates makes any connection with "westernization" or technology. It is about female literacy, and possibly entry of women into the workforce giving them fewer opportunities and lesser incentives to get pregnant. The correlation has been made between female literacy and a reduction in birth rate.

Another interesting thing (that has nothing to do with any scientific study) is that it appears to me (my own observations) that the lifestyle that is encouraged when we speak of a western lifestyle is easiest to lead in the DINK status - i.e Double Income No Kids. Personal freedoms, freedom to travel and plenty of money to go round is simply easier with no kids or fewer kids. Also, modern healthcare usually assures anyone who has a child that the child will survive to adulthood. Less developed societies tended to have far more children than the actual number that reached adulthood because of high infant mortality. Once you cut infant mortality, more children survive and the family becomes poorer because there are more mouths to feed. In other words "primitive" societies (including traditional Indian society) took the death of some infants as an unavoidable part of bearing children. When fewer children die, the parents do not automatically plan to have fewer children because more are surviving. Culturally, at least among the illiterate/less literate in India, the survival or death of a child is seen as divine will and not the result of science, and does not automatically change human behaviour towards having fewer children. Death of infants and children has been the most potent family planning occurrence for thousand of years.

Indian family planning programs have aimed to cut infant mortality as well as birth rates by attacking from "both sides". First - reduce infant mortality and keep kids alive. Secondly, they encourage marriage after 18 or later, and children to be spaced out so that a woman has fewer children in her reproductive years. China took the route of coercion. India's battle to retain freedoms along with development have led to uniquely Indian issues that most currently developed countries did not face. Even when we have perhaps 50 million "westernized/educated" Indians (my guesstimates) we still have at least 250 million illiterate and poor Indians leading traditional lifestyles. Both numbers are so huge that they create a unique dynamic of their own. We may find birth, infant mortality and maternal mortality rates falling in the former group while all remain high in the latter group ensuring that the proportion of the former actually goes down while the proportion of the latter goes up.

That apart - cultural differences may make some cultures deliberately have more children than others despite a veneer of westernization and partial "developed" status.

[member_22733]

The above stance (conviction, attitude, call it what you will) generates two antithetical intellectual movements. (It is a kind of a pendulum swing during the course of the last two hundred years we are not rid of yet.) The first is a fiercely ‘nationalistic’ mode. It claims that the Indian culture had everything: from quantum physics to psychoneuroimmunology, and from the rockets to the nuclear bombs. It further claims that there is nothing wrong either with ‘the caste system’ or with the Indian ‘religions’. The second is its antithesis: it brands any attempt to interrogate the Indian traditions and the Indian culture in order to recover and understand our current experiences as ‘obscurantist’ if not downright ‘fascist’. It believes that the current state of our society clearly shows the need for: ‘abolishing’ the caste system because it is the cause of social injustice; ‘reforming’ the Indian ‘religions’ so that they become more responsive to the needs of the modern day world; ‘establishing’ more firmly a ‘secular state’ that guarantees the upholding of the liberal values, etc. Between these two extremes, there are a number of opinions (of various shades) that tell us that we should ‘absorb’ the best from both cultures. However, these shades have been cognitively uninteresting so far.

There is, however, a third participant in this debate today. Standing outside the spectrum defined by these two antithetical movements, this voice suggests that both the responses are fundamentally colonial in nature. It suggests further that both ways of talking are obfuscating the nature of our experiences. It says that the Indians today have difficulties in accessing their own experiences, and that their learnt ways of talking about their culture and society are responsible for this state of affairs. It tries to argue that one needs to break out of the centuries of descriptive straightjacket that confines our thoughts and distorts our experiences. It is, I believe, a voice of the future which pleads the case for an Indian Renaissance. I hope to make plausible why this voice is believable and is worthy of credence.

http://www.hipkapi.com/2011/03/02/on-co ... angadhara/

Arun, thanks for posting this resource. I did not know of this man, he is a true 'post colonial' Indian thinker. I have had the same thoughts for quite sometime now. I have been shouting myself hoarse on this forum about this kind of attitude shift that needs to take place. Those are the best words that were ever written on this subject. It is critical that we internalize this.

The Indian renaissance, if it ever occurs, will take a couple of centuries due to the population we have. The changes that need to be made has to be understood and adopted by our administrators, and those changes have to be implemented no matter who is up there. The end result of such a renaissance might look very different from current day west or current day India. It may not even look anything that our imagination may conceive, since it is likely that our imagination is based on the parameters that we have internalized from the west.

[member_22733]

Let me address the charge of attempting to reject western science.

When the briturds set foot in India to start their genocidal mission, they wore the clothing designed to fit England, an Island that has extremely cold and gloomy weather almost year round. They never adopted Indian clothing, you can look at any old painting or pictures and you will always find a "sahib" wearing his bow tie with his "madam" wearing a corset standing in 40 degree Indian heat. One of the things that I learned when I visited the Red Fort a few years back was that the Briturds always wore their "red shirts" no matter what the heat was.

The example I gave above is fractally recursive, you can see it in every little thing about the briturd/oiropean invasion and genocide in India. From the German Vedic Studies folks, to the briturd drain inspectors. They then invent things like AIT and racial studies to explain away the uncomfortable fact that a non-european culture had developed abstract philosophical thought and a complex language to go along with it. Those racial studies then ended up as fuel to the fire for Hitler, but that is another story altogether.

In doing all of this, they managed to digest what was good about us and adapted their framework around it. All this has been well documented by people like Rajiv Malhotra.

If there is ONE thing India should borrow from the west it is that attitude.

Let me give you one example: Child Labor is currently a big issue in the west, despite the fact that children were routinely used in extremely hard labor in all of the west when they were industrializing. The current WU-nama says Children have the right to be happy and lead a life free of labor. They stop buying clothes from Bangladesh because the factories used Child Labor. Briturd film makers invent fake stories about Child labor Abuse in India. All of a sudden Indian liberal fools who run around in their Skoda and BMWs get an itch up their behinds and try to shame us for using Child labor or try to pass a law.

The question to ask is, assuming the west just vanished today. What would one think of the issue, if it is bothering them? Since this is an issue that I have struggled with, I will give my attempt at answering that question:

Given that we cannot take care of most of our children on our streets, I am OK with children doing work. The only change I would suggest is to create an oversight authority that helps these children to get a fair income from their trade AND also ensure that they end up getting a skill based education. If these children can learn a trade, learn basic math and also learn to read and understand the language their trade is documented in, I would be totally comfortable with Child Labor and Children as apprentices in India. The west may cry rivers of tears about it, they are welcome to sod off. The west may stop buying stuff from India, but export is not the only way that GDP and national wealth can grow.

Here is another example that we are doing quite well in: Space Technology.
The difference between American/Russian/European and Indian space program is that ours has been a fundamentally utilitarian one. The Americans went to the moon to beat the Russians. We send a probe there because we wanted to. The US created GPS for their military. We adopted a similar system only when we really needed it.

After every launch there will be a bunch of Indians who are worried about the poor people dying on the street, and there will be a bunch of people from the west who will suddenly become experts in managing priorities for India and comment on how we are wasting our money. They will then promptly send a few satellites to India for next launch.

It becomes very evident that WU has crept into our psyche in every little thing. It is truly a fractal recursion. Each thought that we have about the state of things in India comes with a automatic judgement attached to it. Each idea we have on how to develop India comes with a hidden target that we are trying to meet. We may justify it with Dharma and scripture and what not, but the origin of that target was not Indian, it was a WU thought put in our mind without us realizing it. It is a race that a colonized mind will always run on automatic mode, without even thinking twice about what race they are running and what are the targets they are trying to achieve.

Once we find our footing and stop thinking in paradigms (hidden or not) that are pushed to us by the west, things start looking different. One can then use whatever tools one can find (including science), to resolve the issue at hand. WU is a moving goal post, that is always placed around where west is. We are not obliged to run that rigged race. Nor are we obliged to reject the tools that are used in the race. We just have to find our own race and begin to run our own course.

The Japanese did the exact same thing around the time of the Meiji restoration. They digested western science and knowledge and used it their own way without regard to what the world thought of them. Now the west is trying to digest Japanese manufacturing techniques (kanban, lean) and Japanese work culture. WU does not apply there. Until the second European War (WWII) the Japanese never ran the race the west wanted them to.

[svinayak]

Good Post
Can I borrow your post with Permission

[member_22733]

^^^ svinayak,
Thanks and please feel free to borrow!

[member_22733]

Here is something interesting about someone who parrots WU, Islamic agenda constantly:

[shiv]

It becomes very evident that WU has crept into our psyche in every little thing. It is truly a fractal recursion. Each thought that we have about the state of things in India comes with a automatic judgement attached to it. Each idea we have on how to develop India comes with a hidden target that we are trying to meet. We may justify it with Dharma and scripture and what not, but the origin of that target was not Indian, it was a WU thought put in our mind without us realizing it. It is a race that a colonized mind will always run on automatic mode, without even thinking twice about what race they are running and what are the targets they are trying to achieve.

Absoluetly. we judge ourselves like a firangi judge looking down at ourselves. We cannot think out of the WU box.

In addition to what you wrote about child labor I believe that there is no reason whatsoever for us to meet WU dictated guidelines on all sorts of human development parameters. Only thing is we all have split personalities where the Jekyll-Hyde WU judge in our own minds slaps down any thought of striking out on our own path. I had a raving argument on my alumni forum on how far "modern medicine" has gone and where it has failed and the automatic contempt for Indian systems that comes bundled with a medical education in India.

[Pulikeshi]

Absoluetly. we judge ourselves like a firangi judge looking down at ourselves. We cannot think out of the WU box.

For folks in dire straits, WU is offering a solution (however much criticized!) or hopes of one.
On the other side are folks either in the diagnostic phase, status-quoists, revisionists or at worst imitators!
The guy giving any solution to the problems is better than one still coming to terms with it, what to do onlee...

[Pulikeshi]

Here are my thoughts on Anne, Bob & Carla – criticism welcome:

Rights and duty exits in my mind in both Western as well as SD truth claims. To clarify, while the Western value system
has increasingly slid down the slippery slope of a rights based contract between citizen and mai-bhap (state), SD has not
even been articulated with more recent understanding.

In the above example, briefly, Anne, Bob and Carla all are making claims to their right on the flute. In the Western
model, each of these claimants are 1) making claims to a right 2) are endowed by nature or the creator with said rights and
most importantly 3) their exists an independent party who can impartially realize the situation, fathom the consequences
and come to a solution(s) or enable institutions to enshrine and protect these claimants and procure them their right.
Notice Anne, Bob & Carla could just as well be making their claim to God, a parent or a nation-state. This is critical in WU.

One of you said, they would slap Bob (there is some truth to that.. but you risk a maoist Bob), others
went down the path of picking one or the other claimant to the right. Thank your for the answers... gave me insights...

The question in my mind is not whose claim is more right! The correct question is what is the context and relationship...

SD works by convention more so than declaration, that is, the claimants all have a context in society, either due to
individually - their age, sex, biology, etc. or due to their group affiliation - their ethnicity, profession, etc. In such a set
up it is not the external authority - be it God, parent, nation-state (mai-bhap government) that is adjudicating their claim,
but the others in and external to the groups they belong to - Again this is critical in SD.

To solve their problem of claiming a scarce resource, Anne, Bob and Carla have to enter into a contract with each other.
The solution itself is less important to me - it could be they share the flute, it could be they work out exchange Bob gets
another toy in return he give up the flute, so Anne can play it and Carla can enjoy the music, etc. That the group nurtures
the individual and the external mai-bhap (God, Parent, Nation-State is necessary but not the most important) does not.

This is seen even today in that the Indian civilization battered and bruised it may be but is still resilient and capable of reinvention.
Whereas nation-states, parents, gods come and go... they are useful constructs, but less critical to the survival of the group.

Comments are welcome as usual...

[A_Gupta]

In fact none of the studies or refs I have seen about reduction in the birth rates makes any connection with "westernization" or technology. It is about female literacy, and possibly entry of women into the workforce giving them fewer opportunities and lesser incentives to get pregnant. The correlation has been made between female literacy and a reduction in birth rate.

Very well then, even better if that is true. So if India had started seriously on female literacy in 1870 and followed the Japanese trajectory India would have had half or less the population it has today, and the pressure on the Ganga would be so much less, etc., etc. --- and without the industrial pollution, either.

(Unless you want to argue that female literacy takes off only in a technological society.....).

[member_23692]

Here is a big problem with retaining or re-creating or creating from scratch, a less consumer oriented culture.

Fact1. All humans, have a propensity for greed, for over-consuming, for gluttony, for accumulation.

Fact2. Cultures have to become extremely evolved for a large number of individuals to go against this propensity mentioned in Fact1 above and for individuals in that culture to be highly disciplined and working on a higher human plane

Fact3. Forcing people to be less materialistic by any systematic means, does not work, it has to be an evolution, not an imposition

Fact4. Even if a culture manages to evolve to a less consumerist place, it faces the problem of defending itself, because defense is always work in progress, and defense requires constant evolution in technology, and constant evolution in technology is massively capital intensive and capital formation, unfortunately only occurs in a runaway consumerism system or cultures

Fact5. A less consumerist society has to constantly battle on two fronts - one, how to get enough capital formation going for constant technological evolution to be able to defend itself and two, a constant tempting of its individuals, particularly young people by highly consumerist outside societies dangling attractive new products in colorful packaging

Fact6. It is a very tall order to fight even one of those battles, leave aside fighting two simultaneously, and it requires the highest level of self discipline, unity within the culture, focus, energy, singlemindedness, courage, sense of duty, and yes, the dreaded word of this forum, sacrifice, to have even a small chance for such a society to succeed based on principles of less consumerism and more of "other" human values

This is the dilemma....the material "progress" and massive capital formation in one part of the world, instead of promoting, it inhibits cultural and human evolution all over the world in ALL the cultures of the world, because even if these cultures are able to resist the temptation of new toys and trinkets in colorful packaging, how will they be able to defend themselves from their enemies without comparable capital formation ?

Besides, I have tried to do a lot of research on this subject, trying to keep an open mind and attempting to keep all my preconceived notions aside. I for one, did not find any evidence that India as a society or a culture, was ever non-materialistic or non-consumerist. We have been one of the earliest and most vociferous practitioners of consumerism and materialism in history, most of us, with the exception of a small number of genuine holy men and intellectuals and a few other people here or there. We must not conflate those small number of holy men, who gave us this great "indic" philosophy with all, or most or even a large plurality of our population at any time in history. Right now, in the present, of course, we Indian are far far ahead of the West in our gluttony and greed (and again, let us not conflate actual GDP results with who is more gluttunous).

The reason I wrote the paragraph just above is, that if we are to create a less consumerist society, we have to create it from scratch without any model to use as an example from our past. There is no actual model from the past to emulate, only at best, a philosophy and a thought from the past, which we can build upon, evolve, and then actualize or realize in the present or the future. So, we are in effect, going to be charting new territory. All the nostalgia about a non-existent glorious past is not going to make it real.

So, then if we are to create a new society from scratch, the question is, should we go for the improbably long term sustainable non-consumerist ideal, or should we just try to do a "World Culture" based society, which is a little more realistic than the non-consumerist ideal, but do it to where we at least maintain the Western standards and norms. That will be a huge compromise on the ideal, I know, but it will certainly be a massive improvement over what we have now, and far more practical, even though, still hugely difficult to achieve for us in the present context.

[member_22733]

rsangram,

You are asking us to solve this issue right here and right now. Again, I re-iterate that this thread is not about that.

Any society that has exponential resource consumption demands will find ways to snatch it away from any culture that does not have those kind of demands. That, in short, is what 'colonialism' was all about. This is what China is doing in Africa now. To some extent that is what we are also doing in Africa, but in a much more friendly way than the way China is going.

Once a society achieves demand-pull inflation with a smooth supply chain, it is the equal of a nuclear bomb. Infact they are both mathematically equal, both are caused by the exponential function

The problem with a nuclear weapon with one country in the world is the same as the presence of one gun owner among a bunch of people. It immediately changes the game, there is a different nash-equillibrium from that point on. The solution is pretty open source. Since no man can trust another 100% of the time, there is a chance that the gun-owner might use the gun against a non-gun-owner no matter how friendly he or she is. That means, unless there is a way to defend with certainty, the best option for every man is to become a gun owner themselves and use the gun as deterence. This is the same with nuclear weapons and also the same as the case with one nation among a bunch achieving steady demand-pull inflation.

I know that the state we are in is not ideal, but what makes it worse is that we are running the races that are set up for us by the west. For example: Human development index is criticized by the UN. How to resolve it? One way is to industrialize like crazy and make people productive, so that they earn more (and spend more). How do you industrialize --> Generate more power, How do you do that cheaply, with the resources available to you? --> Fire up coal power plants.

Once we fire up coal power plants the western environmentalists will wake up and then start complaining --> Ohh look at big bad India. Firing up more coal plants than that of UK in every 5 years. Where is this heading to? We all will die of pollution. So they release a polluter index in which India is currently third in the world.

There is literally no escape from this. As I have said before, I know what we do today is not a solution, its a temporary fix. As to what might be the solution I humbly submit that I am ignorant and not smart enough to figure it out.

Added later: Since I worked in egalitarian scientific field, I have a small trust in Human ingenuity. We will figure something out. I alternate between the states of having hope for humanity to nothing but absolute despair The price one has to pay for trying to clear ignorance and the cobwebs of colonialism from one's brain.

[member_22733]

Absoluetly. we judge ourselves like a firangi judge looking down at ourselves. We cannot think out of the WU box.

In addition to what you wrote about child labor I believe that there is no reason whatsoever for us to meet WU dictated guidelines on all sorts of human development parameters. Only thing is we all have split personalities where the Jekyll-Hyde WU judge in our own minds slaps down any thought of striking out on our own path. I had a raving argument on my alumni forum on how far "modern medicine" has gone and where it has failed and the automatic contempt for Indian systems that comes bundled with a medical education in India.

There is another hidden cost of getting infected by WU and it is another one of my favorite topics.
How many groundbreaking have we seen coming out of India? We have IITs, IIScs, IIMs etc. Some of their students have done really "radical stuff", but only when in the US and with a co-author who is a big shot in that field. I am not criticizing these institutions here. This is not IIT bashing. This is not to say that there have not been any ground breaking ideas coming from the IITs. I am willing to bet that even if an IIT student or Junior Prof had a groundbreaking idea in his or her field, it will be killed off by others around him or her, there is no 'Godfather' in India for many critical fields.

Knowledge growth is 'exponential', the more you know the more ways you can construct theories and the more ways you can attack open problems. Thus a knowledge framework is extremely important for any culture that wishes to survive. This framework should be well adjusted to the culture. It should primarily exist to resolve the problems in the culture and maybe in doing so advance the culture. There is no way this knowledge framework can arise in India because it has been hijacked and replaced by another one. That particular framework is set to help the west solve its current and open problems.

Thus to produce ground breaking ideas, one has to outdo the west in their game. Tough chance. And since west keeps exponentially growing in that area, we will be in perennial catch up, unless we set up parallel systems here where people can propose and test ideas without fear or needing validation from the west.

[Pulikeshi]

How many groundbreaking have we seen coming out of India? We have IITs, IIScs, IIMs etc.

My take, Don't try this at home -

1. Macaulite Coolies education teaches us to solve problems - she or he with best mental gymnastics wins!
2. Leadership is all about posing problems - the best ones also know how to solve it!
Need more qualified Chiefs, as there are enough Indians

When you teach kids - ask them to pose questions 'If Rama has 5 mangoes and he gives 3 to Sita, then how many mangoes....'
rather than just merely asking them to answer the question. Just as a simple illustration, there is PHd to be done here!

Beyond that there is the detail of funding sources - which makes many papers impossible without network and access, etc.
All detail onlee

[Pulikeshi]

Here is a big problem with retaining or re-creating or creating from scratch, a less consumer oriented culture.

I can solve ALL of the worlds problems, if only I knew what and to whom it ALL means what.

Boss, if you set up one "declaration" that is supposed to be adhered to by one and all SD
(leave alone why it will or should get subscription), the question is not what will it be, the question is will it be effective?
What does that effectiveness mean to one and all who had the problem(s) in the first place?

[member_22733]

1. Macaulite Coolies education teaches us to solve problems - she or he with best mental gymnastics wins!
2. Leadership is all about posing problems - the best ones also know how to solve it!

This is the key. This is also why the west covets and protects their "knowledge Godfathers" who are well networked in their fields. This is why after the collapse of Germany and Soviet Union, the scientific community was sucked out by the US. China also did that in case of the USSR collapse.

However just stealing them is not enough, it is important for these GodFathers to discover open problems that affect our society. Lot of Indian scientists in the west are capable of posing open problems that concern the west, and they are really good at it. Some are Godfathers in their fields. But in order to pose the correct open problems that are relevant to India, we need them to look at India without the burden of WU. It takes a lot of soul searching before one gets there. I do not know if anyone in that circle has truly crossed the chasm.

Once they pose relevant problem and try to publish it, their current networks in the west would abandon them as soon as they can. They would be a pariah in their community. The academic/knowledge community is like an Abrahamic cult. Get ostracized would mean you are pretty much dead.

Beyond that there is the detail of funding sources - which makes many papers impossible without network and access, etc.
All detail onlee

Correct! This is where WU deals another body blow for any attempt to study anything that does not fit their paradigm. The exponential rate of knowledge increase I talked about earlier, comes due to the power of network. No one in academia/knowledge industry is an Island. There is a whole economic ecosystem, with countries being schools of throught and demand/supply commodity being papers and funding.

So by playing to the whims of WU, one as an academic can get access to a treasure of information and can have access to knowledge that is built upon decades of hard work. Even if one is not from a western country one may find a Godfather and plug into his vast network. The price of doing business with that GodFather is that you will end up solving problems for the west, which will then be used to propagate WU, which is what got you here in the first place

This is another chain that needs to be broken. Will we break it? How to break it? I dont know It is an open problem for interested indic students to solve.

[Kannan]

1. Macaulite Coolies education teaches us to solve problems - she or he with best mental gymnastics wins!
2. Leadership is all about posing problems - the best ones also know how to solve it!

This is the key. This is also why the west covets and protects their "knowledge Godfathers" who are well networked in their fields. This is why after the collapse of Germany and Soviet Union, the scientific community was sucked out by the US. China also did that in case of the USSR collapse.

However just stealing them is not enough, it is important for these GodFathers to discover open problems that affect our society. Lot of Indian scientists in the west are capable of posing open problems that concern the west, and they are really good at it. Some are Godfathers in their fields. But in order to pose the correct open problems that are relevant to India, we need them to look at India without the burden of WU. It takes a lot of soul searching before one gets there. I do not know if anyone in that circle has truly crossed the chasm.

Once they pose relevant problem and try to publish it, their current networks in the west would abandon them as soon as they can. They would be a pariah in their community. The academic/knowledge community is like an Abrahamic cult. Get ostracized would mean you are pretty much dead.

Beyond that there is the detail of funding sources - which makes many papers impossible without network and access, etc.
All detail onlee

Correct! This is where WU deals another body blow for any attempt to study anything that does not fit their paradigm. The exponential rate of knowledge increase I talked about earlier, comes due to the power of network. No one in academia/knowledge industry is an Island. There is a whole economic ecosystem, with countries being schools of throught and demand/supply commodity being papers and funding.

So by playing to the whims of WU, one as an academic can get access to a treasure of information and can have access to knowledge that is built upon decades of hard work. Even if one is not from a western country one may find a Godfather and plug into his vast network. The price of doing business with that GodFather is that you will end up solving problems for the west, which will then be used to propagate WU, which is what got you here in the first place

This is another chain that needs to be broken. Will we break it? How to break it? I dont know It is an open problem for interested indic students to solve.

This makes no sense. There are plenty of journals and papers dedicated to solving Indian problems.

My last manuscript was rejected harshly by some guy in Bangalore, and published three months later with amazing feedback from a professor at Oxford. There's no massive conspiracy going on

[member_22733]

This makes no sense. There are plenty of journals and papers dedicated to solving Indian problems.

My last manuscript was rejected harshly by some guy in Bangalore, and published three months later with amazing feedback from a professor at Oxford. There's no massive conspiracy going on

I dont think we are talking conspiracy theories here. There is no one ACTIVELY involved in a plan to do eeeeevil things on India. No that is certainly not what I was alluding to.

Many of our thoughts and behaviors occur in a very subconscious level and the reaction to issues become automatic, like Islamic rage boys who jump up and down whenever there is a slightest hint of Islam 'in danger'. Everything in this thread that I posted was to make people look at the cost of that automatic reaction when they are placed in situations they come across every day. That automatic reaction is the truth and no conspiracy. All this happens at a passive level and has been studied very well by many post colonial thinkers.

My point was that this has percolated everywhere, including our entire knowledge industries, right from the time they were setup. That is the point I was trying to make.

Congrats on getting your paper published. You have one sample data, one sample does not make a population so we do not know whether yours is a common experience or not. Also, I have no clue what field you work on, I am assuming it is about some problem specific to India. But the fact that your paper getting peer reviewed by a (possibly anonymous) Oxford researcher tells me that you had to depend on an outsider to publish a journal article about an Indian issue. There is nothing wrong with it and there is no "conspiracy" here. You did your research, you got it published in a (possibly?) international journal? Good for you.

The lament here is that we must reach a point where we can publish peer-reviewed articles inside India, written by Indians and written for Indians. This maybe completely "unhooked" from current state of the art, but as long as we follow the scientific principles we should be alright. The articles on the journal may not make sense to a western researcher. The ecosystem needs many more things, funding, research labs the import of people etc. This should be created with the hope that there are intellectual leaders in every possible field in India. Ofcourse such a forum should be functioning with mutual respect for any and every researcher involved in it.

In such a case, a study based on solid data concluding that it is OK to employ child labor would not have many problems getting published (and possibly accepted as a policy by the government). I bet if someone did that today and found it to be Ok, his/her funding from the west would be cut off in no time. Similarly any medical student finding out solid evidence that some of the Ayurveda treatments might be "better" than "modern" medicine might find space to publish in such environment and have her voice heard. Whereas anyone from the west might look at her data and the first instinct would be "wtf is she smoking", "this is bull$hit".

I hope you get my drift. The problems we face are acute, the solutions that we may come up with may not be conventional and fly in the face of what the west considers "good". But if one has solid evidence for ones theories, where would one go to make it known (aka publish) it? Or worst, the west may be marginally interested in something that is an acute problem in India and the field does not get much international funding. In such a case, where would a researcher go to find money to test his theories? Where would he or she publish her results? Would he/she ok with some random anonymous from the west peer reviewing his/her analysis? He may have to scratch his brain to understand why he/she is applying things the way he/she is applying them.


I hope I am clear enough here. More later.

[brihaspati]

An X-post to understand the development and rise of Western Universalism and potential fall.....

That graph doesn't tell what happened before 1820. This one does:
We were in decline long before the British came in. The Mughals were by no means helpful. The Chinese saw a major drop between the Ming and Qing dynasties, before recovering until the Qing themselves started stagnating. Comparing time horizons, they pretty much fell off a cliff as the Qing Empire unraveled. To their credit, they're recovering with equal vigor.

The graph shows how WU developed and rose with increasing properity of so called West. And with the re-emergence of China and India it could be reconfined to Europe and North America unless both are WUized!!!


WU goes hand in hand with economics.

The proportions are in direct sync with gain or loss of share of global trade, and colonial expansion or loss of territory. More connected with military expansion, overseas territorial expansion, or retreat.

Note European zone share increases exactly from the time of influx of South American looted bullion, which spread throughout Europe through the Dutch and Italian (including church) banking systems. Both China and India suffer from the central Asian expansions/loss of silk-route trade/ and rise of the destructive Arabic islamic expansion that disrupted the east-west trade.

India's GDP share began to fall from gradual loss of influx of surplus bullion first due to retreat of Romans and Roman trade from western Indian Ocean beginning 400-500 CE. Then the destruction of ME trade routes from Islamic wars and genocidal expulsion of more traditional/established populations that maintained the east-west trade between 500-800. 800-900 was a global mega drought that affected tropical and sub-tropical areas more than Europe.

One can see that GDP health rises in direct relation to increasing military capacity to enforce trade and capital flows into regional favour. Japan is not an exception, as its post war growth should be seen as part of an expanding military hegemony of the US/west over Pacific rim.

[shiv]

There is another hidden cost of getting infected by WU and it is another one of my favorite topics.
How many groundbreaking have we seen coming out of India?

Two problem words here - "groundbreaking" and "seen". I will ignore the former and will explain that "groundbreaking" can have a different definition.

"Seen" is a problem word in some strange ways - and I will try and explain that

For many years (decades in fact) Indian hospitals have been churning out results that were available only in the west, and they are doing it at one tenth (or even one hundredth) of the cost in the west. When people howl poverty poverty poverty all cost reduction is groundbreaking. When the same or largely similar results are obtained on humongous numbers of "poor" people what we are looking at is a groundbreaking achievement.

How is this achieved. Actually the details would take too long to describe - but let me simply dumb it down under two headings

1. Low salaries (relative to the west)
2. Innovative use of equipment and chemicals

Low salaries is across the board. Every medical related worker, doctors included in India gets paid one tenth or even one fiftieth or less than what a comparable job would earn in the west. Why do they keep doing it? Would you describe this situation as
1. They are poor and something is better than nothing
2. Its a job, and they are made to work like slaves in India
3. Everyone gets low pay - everyone does the same job as in the west. Could this be altruism?

As regards innovative use of equipment - everything is aimed at getting maximum bang for the buck. Let me use this example to differentiate between two different definitions of "consumerist society".

If you have a company such as Apple releasing a new phone every two years and a large number of people change their phones every two years you have a consumerist society that is consuming at a particular rate measured in new phones bought per capita per year.

If you have a company in India that produces a new phone every two years but people change their phones only every four years, you still have a consumerist society, but the latter consumerist society is making do with something nominally described as "less" and using it over a longer period of time. Is this because Indians are poor? Or are they cheap? Or less enthusiastic about the latest advances.

Some of the ways in which Indian hospitals "make do" can be "seen" in a whole lot of negative ways, but the results belie the impression. And costs of equipment use too are reduced in Indian hospitals. This stuff is groundbreaking for patients but its heartbreaking for a company that wants to see its medical equipment sales graph rising and rising and rising.

Another thing about how things are "seen". Anyone who looks at traffic volumes at a busy Indian intersection such as "Corporation circle" in Bangalore will find that the number of humans going through per minute is probably among the highest in the world. No one actually talks about that. Everyone talks about how chaotic traffic is, how much Indians honk, how bullock carts and hand drawn carts (low caste slave labor?) slow down traffic. Of course there is a price to pay for such "chaos", and that price is time. In in Indian city it is difficult to average more than 15 kmph. That means that workplaces and homes tend to develop in close proximity. But the payoff is that unparalleled numbers of people get to where they need to go. Is this groundbreaking? Or is it simply Indian chaos?

Solutions suitable for India are being reached all the time - but most Indians hear only condemnation of Indian solutions because they do not conform to western norms. They are "seen" as stupid, indisciplined or chaos.