Two Indian Cultural Traits that Screwed India

If anyone asks me to suggest two Indian traits that have brought the nation to its present screwed condition, then I would name them as- *complacency* and *gullibility*. When it comes to deciphering and learning from our own historical past we are amazingly complacent. Oh it is Indian history, the so-called desi culture, so what’s to learn in that. After all, what can we possibly learn from a culture that could not defend itself from a single invader from the many that choose to plunder its people during the last 1000 or so years! And if you consider astrology and chanting in front of havan kunds to be part of culture then the joke is on you.

Every facet of desi culture is weak, it is obsolete and much like last week’s newspaper it is fit only to be disposed off to the raddiwallah at the price of some lose change. What we need is to modernize, and modernization means Westernization. Ahem! The ways of the white-skinned gentlemen are unquestionable; we have to accept blindly what they say, for we aren’t good enough to think for ourselvesâÂ?¦ If anything, the Indian obsession with the West has already breached the banks of sanity, where there are many among us for whom every Western fart is fragrant. The stigma of cultural inferiority is such that we cannot help but be the most gullible in front of even the most absurd Western idea.

Oh it is Western fart, so how can it stink, that is what the obsessed desis would like to pontificate. If you consider that to be an exaggeration try considering communism. What is communism, if not Western fart, to be more precise European fart? Marx was born in Germany. He preached his gospel of dialectic materialism only in Western European countries. There is no evidence of his ever having traveled to Asia, certainly not to India, though in the end it is countries from Asia that got ensnared by his theories. Well, obsession with West is a malaise that is prevalent not just in India; rather it inflicts every Asian nation.

Asians bottled Marx’s fart and brought it proudly to their nations, where it spread such a stink that hundreds of millions died across Russia, China, and as India accepted Marxism only in diluted form, here it caused widespread poverty and corruption. Despite being proved so decisively that communism does not work, there are acolytes who just won’t give up their share of Marx’s fart, which they continue to treasure in a desperate hope that if they continue to travel on the path charted out by Marxism, they may reach the great heights of Stalin or Mao and wield an awesome power to send tens of millions to concentration camps where they could meet their doom. What is greatness, if not the power to inflict the greatest of all disasters!

And the Indian tendency to bottle Western fart and bring it proudly to India has not ended with communism. All sorts of ridiculous Western theories are being released in the Indian atmosphere on a regular basis, where they raise a great stink. The bogey of *Global Warming* is a fart even more vicious than what Marx spewed when he talked about the dictatorship of the proletariat. The notion that humans are somehow responsible for warming of the globe has been thoroughly rejected by reputed scientists everywhere in the world. But Indians being Indians cannot let go of it. Every new industrial project, every new infrastructure project is vehemently opposed by determined groups of Indian environmentalists who spout incomprehensible theories of Global Warming as if they were chanting mantras from some new-fangled Vedas.

There is no doubt at all that there is a lot we can learn from the West, but learning is one thing and blindly accepting everything that comes out of a Western mouth is completely other. If we applied our brains and refused to bottle the Western farts of Communism, Global Warming, etc then India and all of Asia could be a much better place. The need of the hour is for us to be judgmental not just about what we take from the West but also about how we decipher aspects of our own culture. There is a lot that we can learn from our past, which is rich enough to guide us into a vibrant future. How many of us would know that some preliminary forays on theory of capitalism had been made by Kautilya, the vastly underestimated Indian philosopher from around 300 BC.

Arthashastra, when translated from Sanskrit means Ã?¯Ã?¿Ã?½handbook of profit’, and it is basically a text that deals in issues of how the state should be managed so that citizens may exist in peace and prosperity. It is even possible that Aristotle may have learned a few things from Kautilya, as both the great teachers were almost contemporaries. More research is needed in Kautilya’s work so that his true contribution to the modern capitalist thought can be made public to a world that is given to being contemptuous towards things Indian and eulogistic towards every European fart.