Saturday 26 May 2012

The Broad Reality of the Altered Indian Mindset

Firstly, thank you everyone for reading this blog over the past year and for your constant support! This week I started receiving emails about any help/advice I could offer with respect to each of your individual situations, and I hope my comments helped you out. It feels good knowing that I may have helped some people the way others have helped me.

Moving on, today's blog post addresses an important issue - the Indian mindset. No, this is not GMAT-related, so if that's what you're here for, then this is not the post for you. My dad has a habit of sending me around four to five articles a day from the Times of India, just to learn and keep in touch with whats happening back at home. And a couple of days ago, he sent me this article, titled "Shining India, swaggering India".

The title of the article as well as the opening sentence - Rage is the dominant emotion in India today - can be perhaps a little misleading. The article doesn't discuss rage and how to overcome it. Rather, the article addresses the Indian mentality of power, and how power is more abused than put to good use - and this is addressed right from the second line.

How many times do we speak of corrupt politicians and other people of authority? The following paragraph is spot on:



It is to be noted that abusing power is not restricted to the celebs. Ordinary people abuse waiters, maids, security guards, small shop owners and others with similar professions. There is no civility in everyday conversations. I don't mean this to come off as arrogance, but to give an example, I use 'please' and 'thank you' pretty often. Shop owners and waiters are literally startled when that happens - and it even goes to the extreme where sometimes I am asked to pay more in shops as they think I'm a foreigner. All because I was polite. As the article says:



The really sad thing is that people accept this - people accept the fact that we Indians have different rules of treating people depending on who that is, something even the writer of the article noted:



How on earth can people even think that they are better than others because of what they do? What about those who happen to be born into a rich family and start acting like they own the world? What about those who use their fame to act like they are God's gift to the rest of our country?

No one knows when this will end. The biggest shame is that our rage seems to be directed towards those at the bottom of the social ladder, those unable to defend themselves, those who are expected to merely surrender as the 'superiors' use their authority on them. As the writer of the article asks:




3 comments:

  1. I read your article, and yes you touched the nerve, the base , a cause.

    But when I talked with my friends, peers for the issues in India or something else which made India blocked, most of the people provide different types of practical points which made India to the situation of today.

    I would like to listen that practical points/ approach which any Indian can use means any Indian can apply knowingly or unknowingly so that Indians can change.

    The way Google made the the technology and everybody is using it, with-in 10 years it changed the thought of every individual.

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