In the previous article, I delved into the absence of moral foundations in India and elsewhere in the Third World. Considering this, the institutional structure left by colonizers cannot survive. Each of these Third World countries, in its unique way—civil wars, over-population, self-destruction, hedonism—will negate the benefits bestowed by the colonizers, Christian missionaries, and Western technology, reverting to its pre-colonial state of subsistence living, savagery, and barbarianism.
Without a rational, moral fabric—the essential civilizational factors—entropy reigns, and nature asserts itself. Intellectual or financial capital cannot coalesce, fails to hold together, and gets frittered away. The following focuses on exemplifying the decay and degradation which are gaining pace in India.
A staggering 800 million Indians get government-provided free rations, equivalent to the total populations of the USA, Canada, and the twenty-seven countries comprising the European Union. The majority of the remaining 1,435 million Indians receive subsidized rations.
While extremely low, India’s GDP per capita of U$2,389 (2022) still gives you a misleading glimpse of reality. A significant portion of the GDP benefits a minority with political connections or a business façade.
Strategic thinking among Indian businessmen revolves around the art of transferring money—by any means necessary—from your pocket to theirs, devoid of a need to provide a product or service. The absence of shame or guilt in engaging in scams or reneging on commitments is pervasive. Even financial institutions, without exception, impose fabricated charges, including for the spam messages they generate. Social workers, engineers, and intellectuals—whose work is difficult to quantify and is distant from customer feedback—exhibit worse conduct.
Remarkably, those at the receiving end have no righteous indignation and do not complain but look for someone else to “recoup” their losses. With people around you looking for an occasion to usurp your property and money, you must forever be on guard, wasting most of your time defending yourself. Surpluses, if any, in such an ecosystem tend to get frittered away—no one knows where they come from, so society cannot focus on nurturing or preserving them.
Unless the individual in society is moral and wants to provide more value than he receives and honor his part of the deal, any economic value created is incidental and unquantifiable.
Forget about being able to operate in the globalized world, such no-trust behaviors make it very challenging to conduct any business beyond the immediate family, with the latter already laden with significant issues. Managing large firms, achieving economies of scale, or undertaking complex endeavors becomes formidable. That is why, even in today’s high-technology world, India leaves much of its society at the edge of starvation.
This environment fosters a moral hazard and a rationality trap, encouraging individuals to prioritize street-smart tactics over being value-creators with moral and rational inclinations. During my tenure working in India, expressing my refusal to engage in bribery for the sake of outcompeting others or securing an overnight train berth at the expense of someone else was met with laughter, dismissed as overly romantic.
Considering the wages of the protagonist, the daily wage worker, from the earlier article, a foreign investor might be enticed by the potential profit margins achievable by relocating manufacturing operations to India. However, many entrepreneurs encounter an immediate roadblock when attempting to move their operations to India, with most never progressing—those who do often lose money and get stuck in chaotic legal entanglements.
Some persevere, often backed by the unending monies of big corporations. When they fail, they concoct a politically correct explanation. Or perhaps, spending most of their time in five-star settings in India, their bureaucrats never figure out what happened. Why bother looking for truth when doing so might be politically incorrect and risk your lifestyle and six-figure packages?
In the early 90s, after completing my MBA from the UK, with great aspirations to participate in India’s growth, I was in Delhi setting up the Indian subsidiary of a British company. I was obsessed with “incentives.” I hired an assistant. Within a year, I tripled his starting salary in an attempt to address some of his shortcomings. Soon, he was skipping two-thirds of the days as if he had done a perfect mathematical calculation—his instincts were not to go beyond subsistence living and didn’t include any plans for the future. When the company offered him a lump sum, he vanished for six months, returning with the appearance of having spent that time in a perpetual state of inebriation.
In a society devoid of civilizational values, might-is-right is the operating principle, and the individual—across the spectrum of class hierarchy—is driven solely by resource acquisition, power, and sex. The concept of work ethic does not stick in his mind. You can pay as much as you want, but given the slightest chance, he will shrug off. Lacking reason, he cannot see the causality between his lack of work ethic and his $4 per day wage.
The cultural underpinnings of magical thinking, resulting from the absence of reason and moral values, fail to see how prosperity is generated.
The bureaucrats and the police, given the complete absence of accountability, take this further in being outright predatory, asking for bribes on every occasion and without an iota of inhibition in exploiting, including sexually, those who are weak. There is nothing to protect orphan girls and small boys from these predators.
I prefer to call the Indian government the Bribe Collection Agency.
I did my graduation not too far from where the following event occurred in the state of Madhya Pradesh (MP). Scores of government officials—including firemen and police—are crowding around, giving instructions to a lone, completely unequipped man. This is a perfect portrayal of the Indian government. A hundred people do the work that should be enough for one person. And then they fail even in that—the woman, along with another forty people, who had fallen in the well, died. Their families very likely needed to pay bribes to collect their rotting bodies from the mortuary.
This is grotesque. This rescue operation occurred after the floor collapse in Ujjain (MP). He has no helmet and no shoes, and 100s are crowding, doing nothing but making noise. MP is the most venal state in India. pic.twitter.com/J9ujpcBJ0O
— Jayant Bhandari (@JayantBhandari5) March 31, 2023
Anywhere in India, if you go to an Indian government office, you must, apart from giving bribes, pander to the petty egos of the bureaucrats. Lacking honor, Indians have no problems prostrating. They are happy to self-flagellate and be submissive. Here is again a scene from MP, although I do feel pity for the old man, who has no escape from the predatory system:
There is nothing new about an old man grovelling in front of the bureaucrat to get his job done. You see the same, non-stop, in every government office in India. India never became independent. It merely went into the hands of the most sadistic, brain-dead, amoral and crooked. pic.twitter.com/I0ni8uD8On
— Jayant Bhandari (@JayantBhandari5) March 9, 2022
The citizens do not protest against the corruption in the system. They happily pay bribes to gain an unfair advantage. They don’t have a feel for their rights (or duties). Corrupt officers walk around with impunity, unafraid of any consequences. If ever there is a flicker of awakening in India, of which I see no sign, there will be a massive increase in violence.
The manufacturing sector as a proportion of the economy has fallen for decades, now to 13% of the Indian GDP, similar to what it was in the 60s. So much for China Plus One and the massive glorification of India that is happening in the Western media. A cheap plastic toy in remote India will likely be from China.
80% of Indian engineers are considered unemployable. For every job of Amazon delivery guy, a runner boy, etc., hundreds or thousands apply, including engineers, doctors, and PhDs.
Indians, when they look at the West, see what their irrational, amoral, and hence materialistic worldview allows. These are only the superficial—the visual and sensual—aspects, often of its low class. It is easy to blame Hollywood for the social degradation happening in India when it is nothing but a catalyst. Indians are blind to the higher, civilizational values underpinning the West’s progress. Moral values, creativity, work ethics, and innovation, the driving forces behind the West’s material advancements, elude their perception.
Given this, Indians “see” a causality between the low-class, pleasure-centric, hip-hop entertainment they see on TV and Hollywood movies and prosperity. The USA is seen as a place for easy money and hedonism, and looking American is a status symbol. With his power and abundant wealth, the White man appears almost godly to them, yet their perception is limited to the material aspect.
Promiscuity, drinking, and drug use have swept through India, a stark contrast to not too long ago when people used to drink in secluded spaces to avoid being seen, and concepts like promiscuity and divorce were unheard of. I encountered divorced people for the first time when I arrived in the UK at the age of twenty-four.
Beneath the surface lies a profound inferiority complex. During my upbringing, the British were held in high regard. However, over the last few decades, government-promoted propaganda fueled by myths has immersed Indians in jingoism, promoting the supremacy of their languages and religions. Driven by a cargo-cult mentality, leaders believe in making it by faking it. Unfortunately, attempts to mask the underlying inferiority complex have only left people more confused.
An irrational mind can also hold several contradictory opinions at the same time. Even when they talk about the ulterior supremacy of India’s religion or culture, they use the USA as the yardstick, prefacing such statements with “Even America agrees…”
In the propaganda, they have been repeatedly told that the West became wealthy by stealing from India. An Indian communist who, ironically, prefers to live in the USA claims that the UK stole $45 million from India, a figure that automatically increases by 5% every year, close to the current GDP of India. Not that it was an intelligent claim, but not having a sense of fairness and honor and being focused on resource acquisition, Indians quickly grasped onto it.
India was a wild place when Islamic rulers came, who infused a sexual morality. Subsequently, the British, accompanied by Christian missionaries, brought Victorian morality, influencing the upper class and contributing to what I call the Christianization of Brahminism. With the departure of that leadership and its influence long gone, the primal culture of India has been resurfacing.
This is not Shanghai or Tokyo
Hard-core reality of Today’s India
Mumbai’s subway station pic.twitter.com/ecaSlmBZMa
— Turuk Makto (@TurukMa20465407) May 29, 2023
India is building a massive infrastructure. It is mimicking China, hoping that this—which amounts to putting the cart before the horse—will enable India to grow at the same pace as China did when it had the GDP equivalent to today’s India. However, this strategy reveals a cargo-cult mentality not only among Indians but also within international organizations.
Windows are just small doors anyway. pic.twitter.com/WRgY6cZRJE
— Cow Momma (@Cow__Momma) January 2, 2024
Anyone who claims that India can ever even remotely replicate China, given its lack of skills, untrained people, deeply embedded irrationality, and a mental operating system rooted in magical thinking, lacks understanding about both countries.
#WATCH | Madhya Pradesh: An under-construction flyover collapses in Jabalpur. The injured labourers have been shifted to the hospital. Further investigation is underway. pic.twitter.com/k4hS7aDusq
— ANI MP/CG/Rajasthan (@ANI_MP_CG_RJ) October 7, 2023
Everything in India is done haphazardly, devoid of a safety concept. They do not isolate the construction site or provide an alternative to those on the road. Heavy machines, workers, vehicles, and pedestrians use the same place. Instead of improving transportation, the haphazard construction has left the country in chaos—hardly anything that gets constructed does not claim several lives.
A simple bridge construction, which would take weeks in China, takes years if not decades. A bullet train—India’s first—that it started constructing in 2017 and was expected to be complete in five years is still five years from expected completion.
Terrible footages coming out of #Sikkim of the 1200 MW #ChungthangDam being breached.
Precisely why many have warned about the #Himalayan zone not being suitable for big dams & heavy #infrastructure. But a certain model of ‘development’ burries such cautions, putting all at risk! pic.twitter.com/U7Y8vgiIlr
— kaustubh (@kaustubhdeka) October 4, 2023
In most cases, the loss of economic value because of disruption does not justify the investment.
Alas, there is more. Bridges fall apart, and roads get washed away after a single rain. Before a bridge gets constructed, ten start screaming for heavy maintenance.
Indian roads get washed away after a single rain. pic.twitter.com/03XNDQjDnR
— Jayant Bhandari (@JayantBhandari5) November 20, 2023
Lacking reason, Indians cannot make an economic calculation of the value of their investment. India should have stuck to simple roads, which, given entropy, it must eventually return to. Collapsing bridges and tunnels and washed-away roads will be a massive liability, and in its wake, it will have left a horrendous debt load on the nation.
#WATCH | Under construction Aguwani-Sultanganj bridge in Bihar’s Bhagalpur collapses. The moment when bridge collapsed was caught on video by locals. This is the second time the bridge has collapsed. Further details awaited.
(Source: Video shot by locals) pic.twitter.com/a44D2RVQQO
— ANI (@ANI) June 4, 2023
In the past, a 20% bribe was the norm to secure a construction job, but recently, the going rate has purportedly escalated to 50%. Construction mafia have transformed into publicly listed corporations, facilitating the wholesale transfer of bribes to government officials. This shift has coincided with a rapid rise in organized crime. The police, historically corrupt and predatory from the top to the bottom, have essentially become the uniformed arm of the mafia.
The condition of newly constructed flyover from Kurla to Santacruz through the Mumbai university @mybmc @CMOMaharashtra pic.twitter.com/t1xEU30ehO
— Pradeep Mestry (@mestryp) July 2, 2023
As time passed, every Indian political party has given up everything to do with public policy. They had to. Indians don’t care about justice, law and order, or the economy. They care about freebies and a show of Hindu supremacy. Even the middle class has no interest other than the drama of a false sense of superiority, worrying about the moon mission rather than for the welfare of its starving masses and deluding themselves about how India will overtake China and, indeed, the USA.
In MP, where I grew up, the state is financially bankrupt. The bureaucracy has a free hand to collect bribes, now only limited by the extreme poverty that has set in. The mafia gives direct orders to the top officers, and the newly appointed Chief Minister is focused on things like changing the prime meridian to MP.
India is one big blob of chaos and irrationality. This is reflected in its manufacturing processes, systems, organizations, infrastructure, traffic, and relationships. The Indian government gives dreamlike hopes and grand visions of its mythical past to its people, which the middle class uncritically latches on to. The government’s latest claim is that by 2080, the Indian economy will surpass China’s by 90% and outgrow the American economy by 30%.
India is one big blob of chaos and irrationality. This is reflected in its manufacturing processes, systems, organizations, infrastructure, traffic, and relationships. The Indian government gives dreamlike hopes and grand visions of its mythical past to its people, which the middle class uncritically latches on to. The government’s latest claim is that by 2080, the Indian economy will surpass China’s by 90% and outgrow the American economy by 30%.
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