Comment by throw2343w2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throw2343w2 | Hacker News Reader

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This is hardly a new phenomenon.

India has for the past few hundred years been run by an elite linguistic minority - the so called Macaulay's children. It's hardly a wonder that the deep state in India both despises and organizes self-righteous protests against local linguistic communities, all while simultaneously ensuring that education, the bureaucracy and employment remain isolated to English speakers. Little wonder that most of India's bright minds leave for the US right after (or even before) graduation.

It's astonishing that Social 'Scientists' have paid such little attention to such glaring structural disparities (compared to say China), while they go on wrecking what's left of Indian society using theories entirely developed by foreigners. Education has definitely gone downhill as a result over the past few decades - while my parents tell us stories of great education in Public schools (run, quite sensibly, in the local languages), I can see the abysmal state of these today. The state has tried to offload its duties (while imposing one of the highest tax rates in the world) by emburdening Hindu-run schools (somehow this is 'secular') using RTE, but the competition and the fees at some of the better schools has become quite absurd of late, costing people close to ~$3000 annually, and an additional one time 'donation' which will help cut the long queues for these schools.

Considering that this kind of colonial social structures are absent in most countries, it is to be expected that the Indian economy can't really outgrow its ~100 million elite, while the underclass remains bound in a sub-saharan level educational and cognitive achievements (that is if they're even literate).

It is very interesting that the self-labelled "Left" in India is at the helm of further pushing these colonial policies, while the supposed "right", in their bombastic arrogance, are happy to implement them (see Shiv Sena, BJP etc., and also the DMKs in Tamil Nadu). It's very unlikely that India will ever achieve parity with China in our lifetimes, considering its self-destructive tendencies.

English is the ideal "neutral" link language for a country with as much linguistic diversity as India (thus also making it a suitable medium for education.) The alternative would be to force the whole country to learn a single language (Hindi), which is to them more foreign than English is, or to use only regional languages, making it difficult to have countrywide exams/educational content.

There is nothing colonial or elite about English -- it is simply the most practical choice for a link language, given we have to learn it anyway to interact with the rest of the world.

Agreed with everything. English is single most important factor towards upward mobility. Hindi imposition will suffocate linguistic diversity. Even the Hindi cooking channels for example, have started inserting so much nationalistic and religious issues in there. I just prefer Pakistani channels instead nowadays or just websites.

Notice how you need English education to even comment on forums like these. Now if you don't know English you just get filtered out of a lot of big things in this age. There is little you can do about it, because the west got ahead a few centuries during the industrial/renaissance age.

Don't blame west for anything, because our country was reasonably well off. It has warm tropical weather with 12 hours of sunlight, and plenty of water with fertile soil. Plus we didn't have those bubonic plagues. Despite this the kings here barely did anything on the human resources end. Heck there isn't even a remote concept of social equity in India.

Local languages can't show any miracles because you can't do any serious training or academic work with them.

The pejorative 'Macaulay's Children' should have given ample idea to where his comment was heading, and it did not disappoint.

This is a lot of self hate. The west got ahead in the colonial era, not just the industrial era. We had plenty of empires that worked on developing the country such as Mauryan, Maratha etc. I very much agree that a strong command over English is the only thing that can help someone in this country if they’re not born massively advantaged; but there is no need for un-true self-laceration.

If I could go back in time I would definitely smack some emperors around the head for not being more exploratory on the Naval front - but our very fertile soil was our undoing - much like China, no need to go anywhere if agriculture is highly viable right where you are, and foreigners come to YOU looking to buy the nice stuff you grow (spices).

What I wrote is a brutal self appraisal of the reality we are living through.

Where we stand is a direct consequence of what we have done in the past. To verify it all we have to do is see where are today.

Sorry if this offends you. But this is the reality.

You didn't do anything in the past. People from the past are not here now. You found yourself here as an accident of birth and are now aware of where you are and maybe how it came to be.

Now decide where you want to go from here, just like the countless before you have done - leading to you being here.

P.S : This is more as a note to self :).

>>> It's very unlikely that India will ever achieve parity with China in our lifetimes, considering its self-destructive tendencies.

And to add to that, we don't really exist in the most peaceful part of the world with at least two of our neighbors ( Ch, Pk ) having fought wars with us in the last fifty years.

I don't think that is all that relevant in this context (see Israel).

I tend to agree with you that Israel, as a country of its size and kind of neighbors its surrounded with, is not placed very pleasantly. But it is a country far more homogeneous than India in all the respects that make a nation ( religious, social, demographically and economy wise ).

As GP pointed out that India has the potential to self-implode given the inequality and poverty that has been bred for a long time ( hundreds of years ) by various rulers of the land.

The self destruction reaction might just fasten up if a catalyst is provided by anyone of the hostile neighbors.

Not sure about your overall points but Israel is far from homogenous with a large part of the country literally controlled by another government (Palestine).

Israel is very far from being homogeneous. It's made up of people who immigrated there from all over Europe and the Middle East. There is a big cultural divide between the people from European backgrounds and people from Middle Eastern backgrounds. It also has a significant Muslim population (17%).

Israel's neighbors don't have nukes. In India's case, on one side you have a known sponsor of terror(where Osama was found) and on another side we have One Party Communist China. And the fact that they both are partnering isn't helping.

Both of them being nuclear powers further complicates our security situation.

It is interesting that you've mentioned 50. if you expand that to 80, that would be almost every country in the world.

We fought with China, not the other way around.

> We fought with China, not the other way around.

That is not true.

From Wikipedia [0]: Unable to reach political accommodation on disputed territory along the 3,225 kilometre- (2,000 mile-) long Himalayan border,[10] the Chinese launched simultaneous offensives in Ladakh and across the McMahon Line on 20 October 1962.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Indian_War

Not that I am a big fan of SCMP, but this fact is well known that India provoked the war[1]. There was even an opportunity to call off the war but we (our government) denied it.

[1] https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/geopolitics/article/2102555/i...

To each their own, but I'll stay with relatively neutral media, such as Wikipedia, as my source of information.

Anyway, we're digressing from the main topic of this post.

Sorry to say but Wikipedia is far from a neutral source.

Our biggest worry is climate change in the near future. Especially water scarcity.

We're in for a bad time in the coming two decades unless we go on a militant drive to conserve water.

Unfortunately I don't see that happening. Agriculture is our biggest consumer of water by a huge margin, but telling farmers to not grow water reliant but lucrative crops like sugarcane is political suicide.

UP is water scarce, yet it is also one of the biggest producers of sugarcane. Go figure.

The problem has been the absolutely pitiable amount of money which is being spent on human capital by the government. The government schooling systems across the country is in a mess - and this has nothing to do with "Macaulay's children" or English because most government schools are in the vernacular language.

The present government also made huge budget cuts in the mid-day meal programme which is an essential programme which draws the poor into the schools. So overall, things have gotten much worse.

> It is very interesting that the self-labelled "Left" in India is at the helm of further pushing these colonial policies..

When it comes to economy, the current Government will also fall into the "Left" category. BJP for all its talks, has done very little to take the country towards the capitalistic way. It took them years to slash the corporate tax which any economic-right government would've done long ago.

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