I wanted to title this post as what is wrong! But that would have meant making a judgement. I was going over some news recently from India and I came across this headline -- Modi while addressing the party workers exhorted them to be like Hanuman, Just as Hanuman had never questioned Rama, they (the party workers) should not question the leadership.
I thought about this for a while and an interesting parallelism came to attention. Isn't this what we teach our children too in Village India. Is that why they are raised to follow and blindly respect their parents, teachers, leaders, managers and the list of authority figures goes on. And then some of us ask the inevitable question: How come we did not produce Newtons and Einsteins in this country. How come a Jewish college dropout from Harvard can start a brain dead company like Facebook, while we Indians, even though being such a socially inclined people, cannot come up with Facebooks, Googles or Apples of the world.
A culture that takes away confidence of its children cannot produce original thought and great leaders. A static culture with no scope of progress and no idea of where to go next stays where it is and that is what has happened in India. In village India people are like sheep blindly doing their duties and the "unthinking worship" of the heroes of the eras gone by. And some of these people also have half educated middle classes in small towns where they can see money and the glitter of the West without knowing or even wanting to know what it took to produce it. Power is respected all over the world, and any fool can appreciate the scientific and economic progress of the Western world inhabited by white people, without knowing how and why those country were able to pull it off.
I thought about this for a while and an interesting parallelism came to attention. Isn't this what we teach our children too in Village India. Is that why they are raised to follow and blindly respect their parents, teachers, leaders, managers and the list of authority figures goes on. And then some of us ask the inevitable question: How come we did not produce Newtons and Einsteins in this country. How come a Jewish college dropout from Harvard can start a brain dead company like Facebook, while we Indians, even though being such a socially inclined people, cannot come up with Facebooks, Googles or Apples of the world.
A culture that takes away confidence of its children cannot produce original thought and great leaders. A static culture with no scope of progress and no idea of where to go next stays where it is and that is what has happened in India. In village India people are like sheep blindly doing their duties and the "unthinking worship" of the heroes of the eras gone by. And some of these people also have half educated middle classes in small towns where they can see money and the glitter of the West without knowing or even wanting to know what it took to produce it. Power is respected all over the world, and any fool can appreciate the scientific and economic progress of the Western world inhabited by white people, without knowing how and why those country were able to pull it off.
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