Western Universalism - what's the big deal?

[shiv]

I remember reading long ago that the idea of putting tyres on bullock carts improved efficiency of transport in India a great deal. ...

For those in CBSE, there was a chapter on the 'efficient bullock-cart' and how tires, a better placement of the yoke, change in some other structures made it more long lasting, efficient and less of a burden on the animal. I've since read lots of mocking of the effort put into it rather than other forms of transport.

Now that you mention it - I do recall some mocking of this "innovation". It just goes to show the huge disconnect between city students and what was happening in rural India. I write this for the third or fourth time on BRF so old timers would have read this but as a boy in the 1960s I used to travel by train from Poona to Bangalore for holidays. At night the countryside was pitch black except for small fires occasionally visible in the dark. I vividly recall thinking that they were "camp fires". Not surprising because at age 8 or 9 my education outside of school was "DELL" comic books which taught me everything American. That indicated exactly how much I was being taught about India either in school or outside of school. It came as a shocker to me to learn that 80% of Indians were in villages and not out on picnic lighting camp fires and looking out for Yogi bear. All those fires were simply people cooking.

[Yayavar]

^^True...so the NCERT folk had the right idea of teaching it but it was not apparent to most city bred kids why it was pertinent. The same happens now. But thenthere is change, we are still doing it and getting wider acceptance and appreciation - Mangalyaan is using technology but with limited cost and specific targets.

[A_Gupta]

If you believe this economist, Robert Fogel,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Fogel
turns out that the idea that the US South was much less well off at the start of the Civil War than was the North is wrong, and why that idea persisted is interesting. The Northern Abolitionists argued that slavery produced poverty; while the Southern whites rallied around the politics of victimization, namely that the Northern policies were impoverishing the South. So both sides were happy to keep the idea going that the South was not well-off. Most of the Civil War was fought in the South, and the South was devastated. Then, after the war, the South did not recover economically for a long time; fell behind the North by a factor of two, and even in the latter part of the 20th century, were 10% behind the North.

Ah, the power of myth-making!

[shiv]

If you believe this economist, Robert Fogel,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Fogel
turns out that the idea that the US South was much less well off at the start of the Civil War than was the North is wrong, and why that idea persisted is interesting. The Northern Abolitionists argued that slavery produced poverty; while the Southern whites rallied around the politics of victimization, namely that the Northern policies were impoverishing the South. So both sides were happy to keep the idea going that the South was not well-off. Most of the Civil War was fought in the South, and the South was devastated. Then, after the war, the South did not recover economically for a long time; fell behind the North by a factor of two, and even in the latter part of the 20th century, were 10% behind the North.

Ah, the power of myth-making!

This image shows the distribution of blacks in the US.

The south of the US appears to be represented exactly by the states where there are most blacks. I did not know that the states to the south and west of Texas are not "south"

[shiv]

Here are two maps:

The first is of agricultural cultivation intensity. Compare that image with the image of the world at night below that. Even today, populations tend to congregate where most food is produced. Sounds like a "duh!" conclusion - but a lot of historic population shifts were to lands that were livable because the land was fertile. Later slaves were taken in droves to some of those lands as agricultural labourers







Below is a map of percentage of cultivable land
http://www.desdeabajo.info/media/k2/ite ... 90c_XL.jpg

[Gus]

The south of the US appears to be represented exactly by the states where there are most blacks. I did not know that the states to the south and west of Texas are not "south"

well its not a geographical south.

when the US was formed, the southwest of today (texas, new mexico and arizona) were with mexico. so, as a cultural term - south would mean the south of old - without those southwest states.

[Gus]

also - note the three major cities that have black majority, outside of traditional black heavy south - oakland, chicago and detroit. you can spot these in the map without referring to political maps.

[shiv]

The south of the US appears to be represented exactly by the states where there are most blacks. I did not know that the states to the south and west of Texas are not "south"

well its not a geographical south.

when the US was formed, the southwest of today (texas, new mexico and arizona) were with mexico. so, as a cultural term - south would mean the south of old - without those southwest states.

Aha! That explains it. Thanks

[shiv]

I wonder if Germany has some lessons for India. Just a thought.

As far as I can tell, Germany did very little to contribute to the values being promoted as western universalism. They were openly white supremacist and racist and have never pretended to have been otherwise. Yet, Wiki says:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_h ... of_Germany

Germany before 1800 was heavily rural, with some urban trade centers. In the 19th century it began a stage of rapid economic growth and modernization, led by heavy industry. By 1900 it had the largest economy in Europe,

The first several years after World War II were years of bitter penury for the Germans. Seven million forced laborers left for their own land, but about 14 million Germans came in from the East, living for years in dismal camps. It took nearly a decade for all the German POWs to return....After 1950, Germany overtook Britain in comparative productivity levels for the whole economy

[A_Gupta]

US map at onset of the Civil War:
http://etc.usf.edu/maps/pages/800/809/809.htm

[A_Gupta]

Shiv,

For links not provided here, go here:
http://arunsmusings.blogspot.com/2014/0 ... itain.html

The centenary of World War I has set off a debate in Great Britain, about which you can read here. One sentence there struck me:

Britain wasn’t a democracy at the time either: until the Fourth Reform Act of 1918, 40% of adult males didn’t have the vote, in contrast to Germany, where every adult man had the right to go to the ballot box in national elections.

Some digging into Wiki provided this:

1. The First Reform Act of 1832:

The Act also increased the number of individuals entitled to vote, increasing the size of the electorate from about 500,000 to 813,000, and allowing a total of one out of six adult males to vote, in a population of some 14 million.

2. The Second Reform Act of 1867:

Before the Act, only one million of the five million adult males in England and Wales could vote; the Act immediately doubled that number. Moreover, by the end of 1868 all male heads of household were enfranchised as a result of the end of compounding of rents.

3. The Third Reform Act of 1884:

The act extended the 1867 concessions from the boroughs to the countryside. All men paying an annual rental of £10 or all those holding land valued at £10 now had the vote. The British electorate now totalled over 5,500,000....The 1884 Reform Act did not establish universal suffrage: although the size of the electorate was widened considerably, all women and 40% of adult males were still without the vote at the time. Male suffrage varied throughout the kingdom, too: in England and Wales, 2 in 3 adult males had the vote; in Scotland, 3 in 5 did; and in Ireland, the figure was only 1 in 2.

4. The Fourth Reform Act of 1918:

All adult males gain the vote, as long as they are 21 years old or over and are resident in the constituency
Women over 30 years old receive the vote but they have to be either a member or married to a member of the Local Government Register, a property owner, or a graduate voting in a University constituency (be a graduate).

.....It is worth noting that had women been enfranchised based upon the same requirements as men, they would have been in the majority because of the loss of men in the war.

5. The Fifth Reform Act of 1928:

It widened suffrage by giving women electoral equality with men.

Further (full text below, but if you want links, visit the URL below):
http://arunsmusings.blogspot.com/2014/0 ... d-usa.html

Unlike Great Britain, with a century-long song-and-dance of the reform acts of 1832, 1867, 1884, 1918 and 1928 to get to universal adult franchise, Germany, not exactly known as a bastion of democracy, equality, etc., had full adult male franchise since 1867, and universal adult franchise since 1918. This is so easily found on Wiki that I don't bother to link it here; I make this post because it surprised me. It shouldn't have surprised me; I ought to be ever aware that my view of Europe is heavily an Anglo-American-centric one.

While I'm on it, the US in principle had full adult male franchise after 1868/1870 (the 14th/15th amendments), and in 1920, the vote was extended to women with the 19th amendment. In practice, it took the voting right acts of 1964 and 1965 and the 24th Amendment in 1964, to give all adults a fighting chance of being able to exercise their right to vote. In 2014, the battle over the right to vote continues, with Republican-ruled states trying to put all kinds of barriers in the way of voting. They do this in the name of preventing voter fraud, which mostly doesn't exist, and the few cases are at the level of a few votes per million. The fifty states have a mess of rules about allowing/disallowing prisoners, probationers, parolees and people who have completed all obligations to the prison system to vote in state and federal elections. As of 2010, 5.85 million people were disenfranchised in this way. (The voting eligible population in 2010 was around 217.5 million.)

Contrast with Germany, (Wiki):

In Germany, all convicts are allowed to vote while in prison unless the loss of the right to vote is part of the sentence; courts can only apply this sentence for specific "political" crimes (treason, high treason, electoral fraud, intimidation of voters, etc.) and for a duration of two to five years.

As an aside, the Republican/Democratic duopoly have made the rules very difficult for an independent or third party to get onto the ballot. (It is a patchwork of laws over the fifty states.)

So the battle for full adult franchise is an ongoing one in the "Leader of the Free World", the United States of America.

[shiv]

I ought to be ever aware that my view of Europe is heavily an Anglo-American-centric one.

Absolutely. And it is Anglo American values, pushed as universal values that are being protected by sepoys even on here.

This gyan suddenly came to me when I realized that the "victorious allied powers" in WW2 will never ever let the Germans forget that it was they who were racist and tried to kill Jews, and it was the Anglo American universal righteousness that rescued the world from this horror. Essentially this means that anything racist and genocidal done by the British before their self-sacrificing war against Germany is now to be forgotten and excused. This is the sepoy line as well.

Another fact struck me.

Along with the industrialization of Europe - every European power vied to grab land and resources from everywhere in the world. Like I said, this was first aided by the invention of the compass and cannon and better shipbuilding. Germany's industrialization started in the mid 1800s and they became a dominant power only by 1900. By that time other European nations had grabbed most of the world - so the Germans simply dominated their neighbours. In a similar vein, Japan - industrializing after 1850 or so almost instantly went into colony grabbing mode - but was resisted by existing European powers because the Japanese, like the Germans, were latecomers.

It seems that the only "universalism" that existed in the 1600 to 1900 period was the spread of industry abd looting and grabbing of resources.

In fact the late rise of German and Japanese power helped India by a quirk of fate - they simply tried to expand like everyone else had done and instantly came into conflict with existing powers. Andd Germany and Japan were powerful enough to more or less neutralise all other European power, leaving the US (and Russia) standing. It was the US that has spread Anglo-American "universalism". Germany and Japan were demonized, and the Anglo American powers donned the halo that they never had earlier.

Interestingly I think this history is well recognized in the west - and I think this is why universalism is pushed. Any country that "rises" but behaves like Britain, Spain, Denmark, the Netherlands, Japan or Germany as it rises will simply punish other powers. India is the only damn country that talks of peaceful rise - which is why India is a darpok pushover. That is why China is feared. India has a model - but not sure if the world will allow a peaceful rise at all. Rising powers are suspected by default and given the history of European powers and even the USA no country is willing to believe that a peaceful rise is even possible. People who talk of peaceful rise are laughed off as liars or weaklings.

So blinded were Indian leaders after WW2 - they thought that peaceful states could rise. That is why they did not align - knowing that alliances were always against someone. No one liked it and India was punished for that.

[shiv]

Question:

If, as we are told , "Universal values" like democracy, human rights, religious freedom, equality for all were what created the wealthy developed societies of today I would like to know which of these values created the powerhouse economies of Germany and Japan?

[member_23692]

Modi's Independence Day Speech - a good one, except, what does he mean by "providing the poor with toilets and a clean India" - a little Western Universalism creeping in, perhaps....

In any event, is this really a matter to be addressed from Red Fort on a day as auspicious and sacred as Independence day ?

Just goes to show how difficult it is to stay immune from Western ideas...and how even a Modi cannot remain completely unaffected by them.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-new ... 52422.aspx

[shiv]

Modi's Independence Day Speech - a good one, except, what does he mean by "providing the poor with toilets and a clean India" - a little Western Universalism creeping in, perhaps....

In any event, is this really a matter to be addressed from Red Fort on a day as auspicious and sacred as Independence day ?

In fact we should all have stayed away from toilets today. I hope all of us did in order to not sully the sanctity of the day.

[Vayutuvan]

Please warn "not to be read while drinking coffee"

[A_Gupta]

Madhusree Mukherjee helped take some of the sheen off of Winston Churchill.
http://arunsmusings.blogspot.com/2014/0 ... chill.html

Perhaps more and more of this will be forthcoming.

[A_Gupta]

Just goes to show how difficult it is to stay immune from Western ideas...and how even a Modi cannot remain completely unaffected by them.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-new ... 52422.aspx

It is an Indian, Gandhian idea. Everyone, Indians and British alike, used to ridicule Gandhi about this.

[member_23692]

Just goes to show how difficult it is to stay immune from Western ideas...and how even a Modi cannot remain completely unaffected by them.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-new ... 52422.aspx

It is an Indian, Gandhian idea. Everyone, Indians and British alike, used to ridicule Gandhi about this.

You mean to build toilets and have a clean India ? I don't recall Gandhi ever mentioning building toilets. He talked about cleaning one's own toilets, which is very different from what Modi said. Modi said that his government will focus on building toilets for the sake of "dignity of the poor".

My only point was, what is wrong in using the outdoors ? We have been doing this right through our existence as a culture. And it is all biodegradable anyway and clearly, recycles the nutrients through soil and ultimately the crop. And what is so undignified about using the outdoors to "take care of business", so to speak ?

Indoor toilets seems to me to be another one of those Western ideas, like a landfill. How is a landfill any better or cleaner from an environmental perspective ?

[A_Gupta]

^^^from simple pragmatic things like this trek from home to open-air toilet is used as an opportunity to attack women, to the more complicated things that beyond a certain population density you really want sewage treatment, the ecosystem cannot handle that much; and so on.

And it is all biodegradable anyway and clearly, recycles the nutrients through soil and ultimately the crop.

Unless it is totally biodegraded before it goes on crop land, you get disease organisms and parasites contaminating the food.

[A_Gupta]

I'm at the 49th minute of Modi's speech - the previous several minutes he spent on cleanliness. I stopped the youtube to write this note at the point where he says - I have known poverty, I have been poor. The dignity of the poor begins with cleanliness. "Svachchata" स्वच्छता. From simple commonsense he is right, nothing to do with western universalism.

[member_22733]

Question:

If, as we are told , "Universal values" like democracy, human rights, religious freedom, equality for all were what created the wealthy developed societies of today I would like to know which of these values created the powerhouse economies of Germany and Japan?

Shiv,

Let me address your question on Germany and Japan.

The important thing here is , and I am repeating myself :- the earlier powers had integrated economy, industry, defense, land-grab into a positive feedback loop, which is exponential in nature (one can look at UQs GDP around that time and it is easy to see as I point out later).

The west already knows this and even has a term for it: Great Divergence. Wikipedia article has a lot of information with the obvious whitewashing of the costs of paid by the non-colonizing populations, genocide and oppression. Here is the graph that shows the exponential nature of growth in per capita GDP:


The real GDP has a higher exponent because post 1850s the UQstanis were breeding like pigs around that time.

There were some changes in thought that occurred in Europe before it figured out industrialization. Mostly, it came from people like Adam Smith. Before him the main thought of economic growth had been mercantilist. Import less-- export more. Adam Smith figured out that if you increase the "velocity of money", i.e. if you "somehow" create a smooth supply chain and then create demand from "somewhere", you need not go the mercantilist way of getting wealthy. Money changes hands quickly allowing it to do more in the same time. You can generate money within the nation itself.

UQ was part mercantilist (the pirate gang) and part "Smithian" (free market) . They put their heads together and decided to keep the free market to themselves and STILL be mercantilist to the "occupied areas". That is, make them import more and export less.

The supply-chain part had India at its beginning for raw materials and the demand-part had China and India at its end. That way, while UQ elites get to keep the wealth, for free!

Germany, Japan and the US found a different solution to the problem of demand-supply. They still traded with UQstan, France and everyone else. They could ride on the smooth supply chain of the early colonial powers at a premium. Which means, they got the "velocity of money" going for them by plugging into European Industrialized trade. However, to compete with the economies more developed than them, they were able to create demand internally because they were slightly more egalitarian than UQ.

The egalitarian nature of Japan is explained in this paper: http://src-h.slav.hokudai.ac.jp/rp/publ ... _Saito.pdf (page 10) :

According to Ryoshin Minami’s (1998, 2000) estimates for before-tax income distribution, the Gini index was 0.42 in 1890-94 and 0.57 in 1937. If back projected, this implies that the coefficient level must have been a little over 0.3 soon after the opening of the country in 1859. It is worth emphasising that while the level of 0.3 does not compare unfavourably with any present-day welfare state.

Please note that there are several conclusions in that paper I dont agree with, I am only using it for its data.

When an egalitarian capitalistic economy Industrializes its wage growth compared to GDP per capita will be close to 1, which means most of its people find one job or the other and will get paid fairly, this creates a large demand internally, again closing the exponential "loop".

Around 1880-1915s the US was becoming big, it had a huge internal market and natural resources and in that era there was enormous migration from all over Europe to the US, estimates are in the range of 50 -60 million, who were getting employed in all sorts of industries. Here is the reference for that number: http://www.cepal.org/de/publicaciones/x ... l1686i.pdf section V.B. The US sucked out most of the poor from Germany, UK and Italy, thereby significantly reducing the poor and desperate population of Europe.

That era also changed the nature of trade around the world. The volume of trade in terms of money went from raw-materials and agriculture to finished product. This is about the time Germany started industrializing. The "new powers" tapped into the enormous market demand in all of the colonizing countries, since there were a lot of "unmet needs" and demand generation in these countries. It was easy to find unmet needs quickly. Europe in that era would have looked just like India today. It took only a short time for Germany/Japan and the US(and also Canada) to close the gap between them and many other countries, becoming economic and military behemoths themselves.

Whoever missed the boat in that era, remained in catch up mode ever since because in every possible market one could think of, there were already entrenched players in the supply side already.

Now the "developed first world" use their money/power differential to find out new ways to be mercantilist to the developing world. This is achieved by constant disruption. WU is one form of it. It is nothing but neo-colonization.

[chanakyaa]

In fact the late rise of German and Japanese power helped India by a quirk of fate - they simply tried to expand like everyone else had done and instantly came into conflict with existing powers. And Germany and Japan were powerful enough to more or less neutralise all other European power, leaving the US (and Russia) standing. It was the US that has spread Anglo-American "universalism". Germany and Japan were demonized, and the Anglo American powers donned the halo that they never had earlier.

Shivji, what is interesting is that Germany/Japan, grew up in the shadows of of large powers, watched them loot, pillage world resources and its people, and thought, "if they can do it, we can do it". Does that thinking only work if one is not constrained by values (built on strong foundation of thousands of years, like Indics) that would make/force you think otherwise (only to fall prey to Brits)? But what is even more interesting is that even after German and Japanese vilification, they continue to be power centers.

[member_22733]

udaym:

You are partially correct about Germany and Japan going "if they can do it, we can do it". They were already extremely powerful and technologically advanced when they started an attempt to colonize others. Japan did start early on and "colonized" areas where the Europeans had little presence. Germans were just itching for settling historical scores.

Regardless, it is my guess is that it is the Elitist-Greed that caused Germany and Japan to go into colonialism.

This is from the paper about Japan I posted above: http://src-h.slav.hokudai.ac.jp/rp/publ ... _Saito.pdf

Japan
After a long period of self-imposed seclusion, Japan re-entered world trade amid the emergence of the first globalisation wave. The stylised facts about inequality trends, summarised graphically in Figure 6, for the period after the late nineteenth century are as follows: first, there was a sweeping rise in income inequality from 1895 to 1937, during which GDP per capita grew at an average annual rate of 1.7 percent—a takeoff from the slow-growing Tokugawa past.

According to Ryoshin Minami’s (1998, 2000) estimates for before-tax income distribution, the Gini index was 0.42 in 1890-94 and 0.57 in 1937. If back projected, this implies that the coefficient level must have been a little over 0.3 soon after the opening of the country in 1859. It is worth emphasising that while the level of 0.3 does not compare unfavourably with any present-day welfare state, the estimated coefficient of 0.57 for the late 1930s is higher compared not only with the corresponding British figure, but also with Britain’s peak index in 1867. Thus, in less than a century, Japan changed from a reasonably egalitarian to a very unequal society. Then came a sudden drop in the Gini coefficient in the period of austerity and reforms immediately after World War II. In 1956, the Gini stood as low as 0.31. Subsequently, the coefficients remained generally low, although it is worth noting that there were alternating sub-periods: an initial rise, a long period of decline, and a recent upturn in inequality.

What does this mean? It means that you can establish a pattern for any non-colonized economy to develop:
Initial State (largely Egalitarian) --> Egalitarian Capitalist (low gini) --> Unequal Capitalist (high gini).

Unequal capitalism means money gets concentrated with the rich few. Things cease to be democratic after that. The rich few decide what to do and who to invade next. The country becomes subject to the delusions of the elites. Thus Japan became more and more aggressive in their colonial policy as they became more and more unequal. Same with Germany who got the itch to invade Serbia during the first European war (aka in WU: WWI).

Here is the data for Germany:
http://www.chartbookofeconomicinequalit ... y/germany/

Look at the time around 1910-1920, you can see a steep rise in inequality.

I am generalizing here and a lot of details are missing, but I hope the patterns are somewhat clear.

LokeshC hypothesis:

Initial State (largely Egalitarian) --> Egalitarian Capitalist (low gini) --> Unequal Capitalist (high gini) --> attempted colonization

[shiv]

^^^from simple pragmatic things like this trek from home to open-air toilet is used as an opportunity to attack women, to the more complicated things that beyond a certain population density you really want sewage treatment, the ecosystem cannot handle that much; and so on.

And it is all biodegradable anyway and clearly, recycles the nutrients through soil and ultimately the crop.

Unless it is totally biodegraded before it goes on crop land, you get disease organisms and parasites contaminating the food.

I really think India needs new thinking about a new model of toilet in water deficient areas. Aircraft toilets and some newer designs for railway toilets may be something to work on. The point is not needing 10 liters of water to flush every time someone defaecates or urinates.

Faeces deposited on dry soil under a hot sun in India first desiccates and then fragments and gets dispersed. While it does not become sterile, the bacterial count is reduced to low levels. Most importantly it must not get into the water supply and this is the weak point. Disease causing bacteria and viruses (including Polio) have evolved to exploit the faecal-oral chain where faeces gets into water where the organisms survive waiting to get into someone when he swallows some water. At some time in the past Indians did figure out a connection between disease, faeces and water supply. The concept of not taking in anyone else saliva, using left hand (self cleaning) versus right hand (handling food) and grabbing and segregating one's own drinking water source from others and boiling milk were probably solutions that had some effect benefiting some people until populations got out of hand.

The solutions that public health authorities use for large gatherings like the Kumbh Mela is "bore hole latrines" built at a safe distance away from water supply, where defecation occurs over a ten foot deep bore hole that is then covered over with bleaching powder and soil. Bleach (Sodium hypochlorite) which is an effective decontaminating agent and not environmentally very toxic when used in moderation. It degrades spontaneously into salt and chlorine. The chlorine is what reacts with living cells and organic matter to degrade it.

I wonder if a compact self contained tank can be developed for every toilet where faeces is collected and then treated appropriately. One possibility may be a process called Joule heating or Ohmic heating that plugs the tank into electric supply, reduces the bacterial count. Don't know - will see what Google says.

[shiv]

Shivji, what is interesting is that Germany/Japan, grew up in the shadows of of large powers, watched them loot, pillage world resources and its people, and thought, "if they can do it, we can do it". Does that thinking only work if one is not constrained by values (built on strong foundation of thousands of years, like Indics) that would make/force you think otherwise (only to fall prey to Brits)? But what is even more interesting is that even after German and Japanese vilification, they continue to be power centers.

I have no answer.

It would always give Indians such as we are a warm fuzzy to think that our ancestors were constrained by values built on strong foundations. The way my mind likes to deal with it is as follows: Perhaps yes, perhaps no. It is possible that Indic values had that effect, but this explanation suffers from the drawback that it is simply a rationalization for laziness, incompetence and inability - all being covered up by the excuse that Indics had it all. This in fact is a difficult criticism to counter.

To be fair we must look for other explanations as well.

For more than 5000 years India has had a climate that allows two crops a year. Almost the entire country is fertile (or at least used to be fertile). The country is warm enough that warm clothes or even fires to keep you warm are not needed anywhere in the country for most of the year and in southern parts fire to keep you warm is not necessary - so fuel requirements are lower in that sense. When I look a that map of cultivation all over the world - I find that the so called "fertile crescent" of the middle east is nothing compared to the fertile rhombus of India.

I believe that India has only had a net migration into India for thousands of years. Only that can explain the fact that India has probably been the most heavily populated region for thousands of years. People who come in don't go out.

Maybe the Indic philosophy of not going out developed because of a rich fertile land? People who came, found a great place to settle, and settled. And developed a philosophy that supported the idea of staying put and worshipping the fertile land and its plenitude.

Just a hypothesis..

[habal]

this defecation business and obsession is now beginning to get to me. As a human, we are constantly reminded of our biological 'organism' roots, we are spiritual sentient beings but in a biological package. That package does remind us from time to time of that vessel that contains our spiritual being. Does that mean we obsess about our biology or we obsess about spirituality, while acknowledging that collectively that we as a society are not significantly ahead in either area at present. But does that mean all the people must now start obsessing over defecation. This is a topic that should be left to the experts to come up with a solution and another team for implementation at micro level. Let this not become a pastime where we keep mentally churning out imagery of how to deal with defecation. I sense another issue here. If we as humans view each other as just an organism of consumption and defecation then we will somehow or other manage to lose touch with finer values that differentiate human from animal kind. What sort of image do we like to see ourselves as sometime in future.

Or do we have to as a society, now start from bottom of the chart and now start to think collectively on how to deal with defecation before we can address other issues. This was a relevant issue during a period in the 80s and that is when the Sulabh movement got going, somewhere it lost steam and slowly priorities were changed.

Our towns and cities also seldom give priority to this aspect. we do not have communal bathing houses or public toilets which can be used with safety. In Europe, coffee shops and shopping malls have pretty elaborate rest rooms which can provide the travelling public with more than what is necessary. In a country like India, we still need development to reach that stage. So is the key to toilets economic development or do we think up a completely new solution. Why did the govt fail in this regard and outsource a model toilet in rural and urbanized shanty towns to Sulabh which is a non-govt organization ? Why couldn't the govt show the way by setting up elaborate pay per use public lavatories (like 30 cubicles per unit in a district hq) and public washrooms or even bath houses (for those areas not blessed with regular water supply). It could even set up large-scale laundromats in north Indian and western indian towns which have poor water supply and which could easily use recycled water and thus make huge modifications in water consumption patterns. Why instead of taking leadership in these issues, the only initiative and that too a feeble one was left to an NGO. There are many questions here that need to be answered and why we failed then, to understand how we can succeed now.

[A_Gupta]

PM Narendra Modi attacked the problem of rape in his Independence Day speech. I had the misfortune of hearing some BBC commentary about it. Per the woman commentator on BBC, Narendra Modi is taking on a huge problem, because arranged marriage is the norm in the 70% of India that is rural.



PS: they "eavesdropped" on a "modern" Indian family discussing the issue of rape. The mother was "sex is a need not a sin, and rape is occurring because of deprivation, poor people don't have privacy for sex, look at all the 16 to 17 year olds committing rape, and was wondering about whether prostitution should be made legal; but that has its own problems, etc." I am sure that this mother would be totally against "child marriage", because that is what the western universal norm is. I also fail to see how lack of privacy to have sex would drive one to rape, presumably the same privacy problem would apply.

PS: there was a son, daughter and mother in this conversation, no father.

[KLNMurthy]

...
I wonder if a compact self contained tank can be developed for every toilet where faeces is collected and then treated appropriately. One possibility may be a process called Joule heating or Ohmic heating that plugs the tank into electric supply, reduces the bacterial count. Don't know - will see what Google says.

composting toilet

[shiv]

But does that mean all the people must now start obsessing over defecation.

<snip>

Or do we have to as a society, now start from bottom of the chart and now start to think collectively on how to deal with defecation before we can address other issues.

LOL

Of course we must not obsess over faeces. But the topic keps raising it head because it is one of the many "parameters" that have become "cut and paste" bytes in the media about India. Western media first - but copied by sepoy Indian media like "800000000000000000000000 soldiers in Kashmir"

Anything that happens in India that is positive but more often associated with a developed country is invariably accompanied with a bashing of India on all the "universal" western parameters that Indians are required to match before they raise their cheeky heads and pretend that things may be hey-OK.

Satellite launch, aircraft design, new car model, a billion cellphones, e-commerce, you name it and you can see the media going to town about town about poverty, malnutrition, infant mortality, rape, toilets. This is picked up by Indians as well who also echo this as if those things have to first come to levels that western (and sepoy) media will accept before we do anything else. It is almost as if we have to look for western praise about those things, and not compete with technology which is "western". You have heard the expression "western technology" on this very thread. In other words. Technology and toilets are western. First get your toilets right, then worry about technology. This is as racist as it gets - but it's the sepoys who apply this that are the most loathsome.

That is why I wrote about two Indias. It's not two Indias actually. It's the same India but the poverty, malnutrition, toilets etc are not going to go away soon but will exist side by side with high development and wealth. And while media might say whatever they want to say, it pays for Indians to understand that India really is unique in having a huge population to start with and going into the population explosion long before the colonized economy could get into gear. Comparing with other nations is completely pointless unless the comparison takes into account the starting point of industrialization, when uniform literacy was achieved and when populations started expanding globally.

Most populations started expanding simultaneously after WW2 because of vaccines and antibiotics. But when that happened only some societies were industrialized and had high literacy and the means to provide that expanding population with the sanitary services that are required. These are called "excuses' but telling the truth is also an excuse. So labelling facts as excuses is simply a way of being critical, as if denial would be a better option.

Open defecation in India (as with poverty and malnutrition) are often referred to as if they are the fault or personal responsibility of every Indian. You did not actually cause any of this personally and your only fault was being born Indian. If you accept responsibility for all these "faults" you are chided and advised about your inefficiencies and those of your compatriots. If you say you were not responsible for all this you are criticized for being in denial. As always it is the sepoys whose criticism is the most bitter. You listen to them as one of your own, but they belong to the west mentally and physically - and reserve a small part of their consciousness to remind themselves of all the crap they left behind in India and how Indians are only good at making excuses and how Indians need to absorb western attitudes, as if it was you personal mental attitude that causes development.

[shiv]

Let me make a medical gyan post to start with. Most infants who died in the past used to die from infections. Diphtheria, whooping cough("pertussis"), tetanus and diarrhoeas.

Now look at this timeline:
http://www.immune.org.nz/brief-history-vaccination

In 1923, Alexander Glenny perfected a method to inactivate tetanus toxin with formaldehyde. The same method was used to develop a vaccine against diphtheria in 1926. Pertussis vaccine development took considerably longer, with a whole cell vaccine first licensed for use in the US in 1948.

So it was in the 1930-1950 period that children were less likely to die from such infections as vaccines became available. The first antibiotics came in the 1940s - and spread around the world.

Now look at the following graph of world population. there is an initial jump from 1930 to 1950, After 1950 it skyrockets. The world population reached 2 billion around 1935. From 1935 to 2000 it jumped to 6 billion.



When you talk about poverty, economy, industrialization etc. You have to look at what the level of industrialization, economy and literacy was in the 1930 to 1950s period when populations started exploding and the ability of the country to organize and build the public health infrastructure as populations went out of hand. For India the chance to do that started only after 1950 and it was 1970 (two census decades later) that Indians really understood how much the Indian population was burgeoning. This information does not come from dreams.

I believe it helps to know what happened to OUR country rather than having all the data about the west on our lips and be ready with their solutions.

[A_Gupta]

Some times satire works best: What you need to know - a policeman in Ferguson, Missouri, shot a black youth who was walking in the middle of a quiet residential-neighborhood road. After that there were protests, heavy-handed police response, and some rioting/looting.

http://www.vox.com/2014/8/15/6005587/fe ... ssia-china

[A_Gupta]

Shiv, Wiki reminds us:

Raghunath Dhondo Karve published a Marathi magazine Samaj Swasthya (समाजस्वास्थ्य)starting from July 1927 until 1953. In it, he continually discussed issues of society's well being through population control through use of contraceptives so as prevent unwanted pregnancies and induced abortions. He proposed that the Indian Government should take up a population control program, but was met with opposition.

The central government got involved from 1965 onwards.

Wiki also tells us

The fertility rate in India has been in long-term decline, and had more than halved in the 1960-2009 period. From 5.7 in 1966, it declined to 3.3 by 1997 and 2.7 in 2009.

Also see this:
http://news.wikinut.com/Population-Of-I ... /39gvcd_g/

http://data.gov.in/visualize3/?inst=d2d ... 4d&vid=430

[A_Gupta]

Dunno how many people here are old enough to remember this:
http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-7939489 ... print.html

[A_Gupta]

Maybe the Indic philosophy of not going out developed because of a rich fertile land? People who came, found a great place to settle, and settled. And developed a philosophy that supported the idea of staying put and worshipping the fertile land and its plenitude.

Just a hypothesis..

Yet somehow Indian thought leaked out all over Southeast Asia, China and all the way to Japan. So much so that the Chinese "Mandarin" is a word of Sanskrit origin (of course, not the Chinese name for their own language, but the foreigners' name for their language).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinduism_in_Southeast_Asia

Likewise Central Asia:
http://ignca.nic.in/pb0013.htm

These influences have been degraded or wiped out by the ill-health of India itself, the depredations of Islamic and Christian conquerors, and of modern ideologies like Marxism and its off-shoots and so on.

If Indians did not force this on these other peoples, then there must have been something beautiful about Indian culture that led these peoples to adopt some or a lot of it -- and this in the time when contacts were infrequent and relatively difficult; there was no such thing as your daily dose of CNN, Voice of America and BBC.

The question then is not why is India not going around conquering other places, but rather, what happened to the Beautiful Tree? Why are Indians letting it perish? Why are Indians becoming a gross, coarse, crassly materialistic people? (Materialism had its proper place in Old India, e.g., see the Sir Thomas Munro quotation above in this thread.) Why aren't Indian talent and energy in full bloom?

PS: to me it doesn't matter if India does not gain its former influence of the kind mentioned above. I use it merely as a barometer of the health of India. The future measure of health may be different.

PS: On the day after when the Prime Minister of India had to admonish the country about rape, and about female aborticide and a sex ratio of 1000 males to 940 females, would anyone say what Munro wrote about Indians in 1813, that this characterized them -- "...and above all, a treatment of the female sex full of confidence, respect and delicacy are among the signs which denote a civilised people". I don't know what external force could make Indians change in this regard.

PPS: per the elders in my family and their memories, the dowry plague hit my particular community ("Mathur Vaisya") only around WWII, when some families made huge fortunes in trade during WWII scarcity. We don't write things down, but this is what memory, however faulty, says. Among many reasons, one why sons are preferred over daughters is the dowry burden.

[Yayavar]

rsangram -- realize that many flushes have passed since your question but Indus valley civilization did have a sewage system and toilets attached to homes. So one can rest assure this is a universal requirement and not western universalism. Modern India can of course choose how to satisfy the requirement including going into the fields though that has pitfalls (in more ways than one )

[member_23692]

Let me make a medical gyan post to start with. Most infants who died in the past used to die from infections. Diphtheria, whooping cough("pertussis"), tetanus and diarrhoeas.

Now look at this timeline:
http://www.immune.org.nz/brief-history-vaccination

In 1923, Alexander Glenny perfected a method to inactivate tetanus toxin with formaldehyde. The same method was used to develop a vaccine against diphtheria in 1926. Pertussis vaccine development took considerably longer, with a whole cell vaccine first licensed for use in the US in 1948.

So it was in the 1930-1950 period that children were less likely to die from such infections as vaccines became available. The first antibiotics came in the 1940s - and spread around the world.

Now look at the following graph of world population. there is an initial jump from 1930 to 1950, After 1950 it skyrockets. The world population reached 2 billion around 1935. From 1935 to 2000 it jumped to 6 billion.



When you talk about poverty, economy, industrialization etc. You have to look at what the level of industrialization, economy and literacy was in the 1930 to 1950s period when populations started exploding and the ability of the country to organize and build the public health infrastructure as populations went out of hand. For India the chance to do that started only after 1950 and it was 1970 (two census decades later) that Indians really understood how much the Indian population was burgeoning. This information does not come from dreams.

I believe it helps to know what happened to OUR country rather than having all the data about the west on our lips and be ready with their solutions.

So far, in this thread and others your main theme has been the following"

1. Bashing the way the West looks at India (a lot of the bashing justified, some not), but you seem to brook no Western criticism of any kind whatsoever - its almost like you cannot distinguish between genuine and justified critique and the vast amounts of ignorant or deliberately malicious critique coming from the West. By not differentiating between the two, you undercut your own cause and argument and more importantly the indic argument, because by not finding absolutely any critique by any Western source worthy of thought, you completely destroy your own credibility and that of the indic cause, by coming off like a fanatic.

2. You have indulged in an exercise of justifying, defending, even praising, the status quo in India as it stands right now, no matter how repugnant some aspects of that status quo is, all by using the vast majority of Western critique which is (and here I agree with you, it is malicious and ignorant) as an excuse.

3. You have completely failed to acknowledge the fact that Indian practices today are a world, no, a galaxy away, from any one or a mix of the myriad of coherent and beautiful original Indic philosophies and thought, and that what we have today can in no way be attributed to any worthwhile Indic which is part of our civilizational traditions.

Therefore, in your world, everything that we have prevailing in india is not just understandable or even that there is a reason for it, but somehow it is all good and desirable and there is no room for any improvement and really, there are no real problems. Any problems we have, the others have them (times 2) and if they don't have them, they have just not had any reason to have them.

If the above is not what you mean, you sure are coming off like that, and if it is not what you mean, you need to clarify that and also be careful in future posts to guard against people like me who are not the brightest bulbs in the room, to interpret it that way.

It seems like the only problem you think India has is one of a large numbers of its population idolizing the West, aping the West, believing in everything Western and acknowledging Western superiority. Of course that is a problem, but in my view of course, it is a diminishing problem, and it is one of the very few problems which is dissipating in India with the passage of time, and therefore, to be fanatical about a problem which is going to certainly go away in our lifetime, to the exclusion of most of our other problems which are not only not going away but becoming worse and more acute, seems to me to be a little our of kilter.

None of what I am saying is to suggest either than you have said anything wrong about Western bias against India or Western ignorance towards India or Western hubris in general. Nor is there anything wrong when you say that the West tends to not acknowledge its own problems and magnifies other cultures' problems and sometimes even demonizes other people. And of course, who can argue that slavery was not prevalent or that racism still is not pervasive in the US or that the Native Americans were not dispossessed of their lands and the entire American nation was built on the four historical pillars of genocide, stealing of lands of people against whom genocide was carried out, slavery and conquest (taking most of the West from Mexico on the Mexican Wars of James Polk) and continues to be based on massive and systematic segregation today, particularly against black people. Nevertheless, to justify and blame all of our Indian problems on that or even invalidating any criticism of Indian issues because of such behavior by the West.....well, our problems stand on their own and are have validity in their own right and none of our bad behavior gets validated or becomes less criminal, because the others have committed bigger crimes or even if others have committed serious crimes against us.

It would be much better, if rather than on a constant quest to justify, defend and may I say, even apologize for every problem that we do have and dismissing even the critique which may have some credibility, if you could start off by listing some problems, other than that we are all Western slaves in our thinking, that India and Indians do face at the moment and how you would propose to solve them, not using Western thought or prescriptions but using our own thought, traditions, cultures and civilizational mores as guides. This would take the discussion in a much more positive direction than a discussion which is purely based on "other" bashing and "self" justification, which is exactly what you are legitimately critical of the West of (creating an "other, then demonizing that "other" and then justifying "self" on everything).

[member_23692]

Let me make a medical gyan post to start with. Most infants who died in the past used to die from infections. Diphtheria, whooping cough("pertussis"), tetanus and diarrhoeas.

Now look at this timeline:
http://www.immune.org.nz/brief-history-vaccination

In 1923, Alexander Glenny perfected a method to inactivate tetanus toxin with formaldehyde. The same method was used to develop a vaccine against diphtheria in 1926. Pertussis vaccine development took considerably longer, with a whole cell vaccine first licensed for use in the US in 1948.

So it was in the 1930-1950 period that children were less likely to die from such infections as vaccines became available. The first antibiotics came in the 1940s - and spread around the world.

Now look at the following graph of world population. there is an initial jump from 1930 to 1950, After 1950 it skyrockets. The world population reached 2 billion around 1935. From 1935 to 2000 it jumped to 6 billion.



When you talk about poverty, economy, industrialization etc. You have to look at what the level of industrialization, economy and literacy was in the 1930 to 1950s period when populations started exploding and the ability of the country to organize and build the public health infrastructure as populations went out of hand. For India the chance to do that started only after 1950 and it was 1970 (two census decades later) that Indians really understood how much the Indian population was burgeoning. This information does not come from dreams.

I believe it helps to know what happened to OUR country rather than having all the data about the west on our lips and be ready with their solutions.

So far, in this thread and others your main theme has been the following"

1. Bashing the way the West looks at India (a lot of the bashing justified, some not), but you seem to brook no Western criticism of any kind whatsoever - its almost like you cannot distinguish between genuine and justified critique and the vast amounts of ignorant or deliberately malicious critique coming from the West. By not differentiating between the two, you undercut your own cause and argument and more importantly the indic argument, because by not finding absolutely any critique by any Western source worthy of thought, you completely destroy your own credibility and that of the indic cause, by coming off like a fanatic.

2. You have indulged in an exercise of justifying, defending, even praising, the status quo in India as it stands right now, no matter how repugnant some aspects of that status quo are, all by using the vast majority of Western critique which is (and here I agree with you, it is malicious and ignorant) as an excuse.

3. You have completely failed to acknowledge the fact that Indian practices today are a world, no, a galaxy away, from any one or a mix of the myriad of coherent and beautiful original Indic philosophies and thought, and that what we have today can in no way be attributed to any worthwhile Indic thought which is part of our civilizational traditions.

Therefore, in your world, everything that we have prevailing in india is not just understandable or even that there is a reason for it, but somehow it is all good and desirable and there is no room for any improvement and really, there are no real problems. Any problems we have, the others have them (times 2) and if they don't have them, they have just not had any reason to have them.

If the above is not what you mean, you sure are coming off like that, and if it is not what you mean, you need to clarify that and also be careful in future posts to guard against people like me who are not the brightest bulbs in the room, to interpret it that way.

It seems like the only problem you think India has is one of a large numbers of its population idolizing the West, aping the West, believing in everything Western and acknowledging Western superiority. Of course that is a problem, but in my view of course, it is a diminishing problem, and it is one of the very few problems which is dissipating in India with the passage of time, and therefore, to be fanatical about a problem which is going to certainly go away in our lifetime, to the exclusion of most of our other problems which are not only not going away but becoming worse and more acute, seems to me to be a little our of kilter.

None of what I am saying is to suggest either than you have said anything wrong about Western bias against India or Western ignorance towards India or Western hubris in general. Nor is there anything wrong when you say that the West tends to not acknowledge its own problems and magnifies other cultures' problems and sometimes even demonizes other people. And of course, who can argue that slavery was not prevalent or that racism still is not pervasive in the US or that the Native Americans were not dispossessed of their lands and the entire American nation was built on the four historical pillars of genocide, stealing of lands of people against whom genocide was carried out, slavery and conquest (taking most of the West from Mexico on the Mexican Wars of James Polk) and continues to be based on massive and systematic segregation today, particularly against black people. Nevertheless, to justify and blame all of our Indian problems on that or even invalidating any criticism of Indian issues because of such behavior by the West.....well, our problems stand on their own and are have validity in their own right and none of our bad behavior gets validated or becomes less criminal, because the others have committed bigger crimes or even if others have committed serious crimes against us.

It would be much better, if rather than on a constant quest to justify, defend and may I say, even apologize for every problem that we do have and dismissing even the critique which may have some credibility, if you could start off by listing some problems, other than that we are all Western slaves in our thinking, that India and Indians do face at the moment and how you would propose to solve them, not using Western thought or prescriptions but using our own thought, traditions, cultures and civilizational mores as guides. This would take the discussion in a much more positive direction than a discussion which is purely based on "other" bashing and "self" justification, which is exactly what you are legitimately critical of the West of (creating an "other, then demonizing that "other" and then justifying "self" on everything).

Let us just take one major problem we Indians face today, for example. It is the same problem we have been facing for more than 1000 years now. The Islamic problem. We have consistently over the millennia lost to this menace and continue to lose ground as we speak. The situation now is critical because as you can well understand, the crisis is more severe after 1000 years of losing than it was when we had only lost for 500 years and it was more severe when we had only lost for 500 years, compared to when we had only lost for 200 years. And nothing has changed. Look at the Islamic State or ISIS or whatever the monster calls itself now. I call it Islam. Beheadings, kidnappings of women, stonings, crucifictions, rape, beheadings, slavery, sexual slavery, unspeakable brutality, domination, stealing of territory, of money, dehumanizing all humans, destruction of civilization and every civilized instinct in humans......all these are the hallmarks of Islam as ISIS has made it so clear that not even an idiot or the worst apologist for Islam can ignore or negate or justify.

How will we solve this problem, going forward, for example, in our own way, keeping in view our unique history, present, our unique culture, our thought, our civilization and our current capabilities ? How will we climb out of this hole ? And please, we are not going to climb out of it by merely bashing the West.

[Vayutuvan]

From the "extrema" of Mathematical Genealogy page I have this table

Code: Select all

Name	                                   Descendants      Year of Degree
--------                                        -----------------      --------------------
Manuel Bryennios	                  115784	
Theodore Metochites	          115783	               1315
Gregory Palamas	                  115782	
Nilos Kabasilas	                  115781	               1363
Demetrios Kydones	          115780	
Elissaeus Judaeus	                  115757	
Georgios Plethon Gemistos	  115756	       1380, 1393
Basilios Bessarion	                  115753	       1436
...

Bessarion was a student of Gemistos at Mytsras.

Code: Select all

Georgios Plethon Gemistos
1380, 1393
Dissertation: Nómoi (Book of Laws)
Advisor 1: Demetrios Kydones
Advisor 2: Elissaeus Judaeus

Students: 
Click here to see the students listed in chronological order.

Name	                              School	Year	Descendants
--------                                    ---------      -----         -----------------
Basilios Bessarion	              Mystras	1436	115753
Laonikos Chalkokondyles   University of Crete		
Theodoros II Palaiologos    Mystras	1425	

Bessarion was teaching at Padova. Today most people in Mathematics and Computer Science (which they started including in the Mathematics Genealogy data base oh about 20 years back) and several mathematical physics people who trace their ancestors to Gauss, Hilbert, Poisson, Fourier, etc. would end up at Bessarion. A few mathematicians who trace their ancestry to UK have much shallower trees going up to the root (strictly speaking the genealogy is not tree and more surprisingly not even a DAG if the edges are directed as is expected from parent to children (or alternatively the other way round).

Works[edit]

Bessarion was one of the most learned scholars of his time. Besides his translations of Aristotle's Metaphysics and Xenophon's Memorabilia, his most important work is a treatise directed against George of Trebizond, a vehement Aristotelian who had written a polemic against Plato, which was entitled In Calumniatorem Platonis ("Against the Slanderer of Plato"). Bessarion, though a Platonist, was not so thoroughgoing in his admiration as Gemistus Pletho, and he strove instead to reconcile the two philosophies. His work, by opening up the relations of Platonism to the main questions of religion, contributed greatly to the extension of speculative thought in the department of theology.
It was thanks to him that the Bibliotheca (Pseudo-Apollodorus), an important compendium of Greek Mythology, has survived to the present.
His library, which contained a very extensive collection of Greek manuscripts, was presented by him in 1468 to the senate of Venice, and forms the nucleus of the famous library of St Mark's, the Biblioteca Marciana. It was 482 Greek manuscripts and 264 Latin manuscripts.[1]
Most of Bessarion's works are in Migne, Patrologia Graeca, vol. 161.

What is interesting to me is that Leonardo of Vinci, the quintessential Renaissance Man

Leonardo has often been described as the archetype of the Renaissance Man, a man of "unquenchable curiosity" and "feverishly inventive imagination".

was born in 1452 and would have visited Venice and had access to St. Marks library. I think one would not be too wrong in assuming that a large number of intellectuals at the time of renaissance would have access to the library and thoughts of Bessarion and students.

Since Philosophy, Mathematics, Natural Sciences, and Arts were completely intertwined in renaissance Italy, it is would be fair to assume that WU is an outgrowth of the Italian renaissance which precedes industrial revolution by a couple of centuries and firmly rooted in Christianity of the Constantinople which was in Asia minor and have imported most of the ideas from Indian subcontinet via the Arabs.

[KrishnaK]

You were arguing against Shiv's statement that Colonialism was responsible for Britain and the West's wealth and for the industrial revolution. I proved that you are wrong, and that colonialism (specifically that of India) was directly responsible for the West's gain in GDP and for its industrial revolution.

I did make a factual error. Not acknowledging that would be boorish. My argument was never that the british did not profit enormously from the colonization of India. It is that they already had gained an advantage that they used to their benefit and our detriment. The west gained a material advantage because of it's political and scientific advancements. It is that advantage that allowed them to colonize India. If that political setup is something that will provide India with a similar advantage, then it is something we should adopt and we did. Whether practitioners of that political setup also indulged in colonialism or slavery is irrelevant. And as pointed out by Johann, countries which hadn't anything to do with colonialism and slavery have also done well.

Now you seem to be asking a different question - which is, why did India allow herself to be colonized ? That is an entirely different question which others are better qualified to answer. But history, as you know, is replete with examples where sophisticated civilizations have fallen to more vicious hordes of barbarians. So, the fact that India did fall to the British does not really tell us much about the relative standing of the two societies.

Not a different question at all. Modern India won't fall if she loses a single battle. That is because the people are fully invested in the well being of the state. In fact on another thread, in an article posted by Ramana, the comparison between Indian and Chinese perception of their own countries is revealing. You should read it up. No Indian Rollie Lal (the author) talked to thinks India will fall. Plenty of Chinese do.

One explanation that I can offer is that the West was clearly far more incentivized to change the rules of trade which India was overwhelmingly winning - by using violence, force or any other means that today would be termed 'unfair trade practices'. When the playing field is level - Indians tend to come out on top, and that is obviously very true even today. So the British were certainly more incentivized to stop the outflow of wealth from its shores to India. Secondly - the state apparatus and business interests worked closely with each other to develop a comprehensive mercantile philosophy that had not developed to the same extent in India. The latter may in part be due to decay caused by Mughal / Islamic rule or due to a general Hindu outlook where Kshatriyas, Brahmins and Vaishyas were individually world beaters but operated in silos and never really teamed up for larger goals.

Inferior political setup. The West plays unfair, India comes out on top if this and that were to be the case is the sort of nonsense I'm arguing against. 100 million people, given access to the same resources, the same scientific and technical base, given the same political freedoms in India, Europe and Africa will end up performing the same over a period of time. Precisely the reason almost every people in the world have had their time at the top and have significant achievements to their credit. So if we fell, there must have been a reason that goes beyond something like

India did not have a mercantile philosophy,....,general Hindu outlook where Kshatriyas, Brahmins and Vaishyas were individually world beaters but operated in silos

How is it that in today's India Kshatriyas, Brahmins and Vaishyas are operating as a team ?