Most elite Indians (primarily savarna white collar urban english medium educated folks like me) land on Western shores convinced that we are just as advanced and developed as these countries as a people. It's just "corruption" in India holding us back. Then reality hits. /1

We see that the West works better on a daily level, but not because of some mythical genetic or societal immunity to this mythical "corruption" villain. Cos there is corruption in Western politics too. They seem to have institutions and systems built over ages to minimize it.
But most Indians who reach these shores are engineer/mba/doctor types. Trained in secondary vocational type disciplines. So our default approach is to find a quick engineering type solution. We have almost zero exposure to sociology, psychology, economics, anthropology, etc.
I remember being like that. Engineer-MBA who thought that because my vocabulary and exposition skills were above average and my quant skills were above average, I deserve a seat at the table on any discussion. Be it climate change, public health, efficacy of vaccines, etc.
For anything, I thought I knew the best. Why was this Obama fellow not trying my absolutely brilliant healthcare reform plan that I have posted on a blog with nice tables and graphs and references to IIT and IIM slang? Does he not know I'm from an IIM? <1% acceptance rate!
My PhD at Penn State slowly but surely changed that. As I learned more, I realized how little I knew. And while I'm still a very emphatic egotistic opinion sharer by default, I try to restrain my tongue and right index fingers on topics I don't know enough about.
A big part of it was humanities education. Marketing is a secondary discipline built on economics, psychology, sociology, and statistics. To get a PhD in it, I had to do deep dives into actual research in those fields. Not just well written blogs and longform articles.
Just a year into that PhD, I immediately found myself questioning a lot of things I'd held as axiomatically true. For example, "raising minimum wage is as pointless as changing the gravitational constant."
Or "casteism is bad but reservations do more harm than good".
Etc.
And of course, the big one, that I had been very systematically indoctrinated into, looking back.

"Yes, climate is changing. But climate always changes. Human impact debatable. Even if it is a factor, nothing can be done given economic realities. Nothing. But market can fix it."
In india, from birth till I flew out at age 26, I had interacted people mostly like myself. In India, we savarna white collar urban folks are champion gatekeepers. Even the slightest dissent on "reservations suck" has a high social cost when most of your friends are Brahmin.
So my two years of coursework opened my mind. Made my realize that not all "socialism" is USSR or even Indira Gandhi socialism. That "why should I be punished for my ancestors' bigotry?" is not the self-evidently convincing argument I thought it was.
Those years of coursework, delivered by professors without the "Shut Up and Listen and women, don't wear tight clothes!" college culture I was used to in India helped a lot. Professors who didn't treat student questions like personal challenges to authority. Also students who...
.. didn't ask questions or do "CP" just for grades or no needle the professor or to win debates. In those PhD classes (3 hours at a stretch), I realized how little I knew. This was not India where exposition predicated on Daedalian vocabulary was inexorably efficacious🤣.
You needed to build actual arguments. Take into account contrary evidence. "Let's agree to disagree" or "We just have different first principles" don't cut it when a brilliant classmate who happens to be black asks you why you thought the civil rights act was govt overreach.
Then I joined Twitter in 2010 and that exposed me to even more people different than me, especially Indians from historically oppressed groups. Talking politics. At length. That helped more than anything on the ground in India, where those voices get shut out or even arrested.
That's the thread for now. I didn't have some larger conclusion here. Just thinking out loud after a conversation with a childhood friend about how much the US changed us both.
I was not like a full scale sanghi before coming to the US. I was writing stuff like this in 2005. But yeah, I was doggedly wrong on many things. Especially economics. I too woulda been arrogant enough to call Elizabeth Warren "economically ignorant". 😑

https://t.co/E68IBPxd83
But the world that I was raised in, "get rid of all government except defense, foreign policy, courts" sounded like a more elegant engineering solution than "let's try to build better systems even if they remain flawed in our lifetimes and remember, these are humans, not toys."

More from India

In his letters describing the India Mission, Carey has given us an insight into how the society functioned then, of how the minds of the people worked and what methods the missionaries used to approach and brainwash the common people.


It is entirely possible that,Carey in his arrogance of being the white man and hence more civilized,his inability to under the Hindu scriptures and his natural disdain for the learned community coupled with his inherent hatred for the idolaters may have exaggerated the incidents.

In fact, considering the venom with which he has spoken about Hinduism and it's practices, it's likely that he has exaggerated these incidents. But it cannot be denied that these incidents did happen even if they may not have been on scale at which Carey has described.

One of his journal entry mentions a debate which happened in a temple in front of around 200 people. Carey describes having debated with two learned men and goes on to say when both learned men failed to answer his questions, he went on to preach the gospel to the assembled crowd


In a letter dated 30th June,1795 he goes on to gleefully narate how Hindus were unaware of their own scriptures and how an supposed expert named a grammar book when he was questioned as which scripture said that the Murti is God.

You May Also Like