There are some things in this article that are true and some false. And as an Indian I can tell you that are many things that people don't understand.
India is huge country. Huge, I mean so huge that it will be difficult to truly explain the diversity we have here. It will be easy for a German to explain what Germany is, Or French to explain what France is and so on. But it will be very difficult for an Indian to explain what India is in totality basically because there are thousands of cultures, ways of lives, languages, people of ethnic origin, color, language, religion and so on and so forth. In fact any form of classification that you can come up to we have diverse categories in that.
This is not true for China. Or Korea or Thailand. Because they are a single ethnic group. People who talk of deficiencies or things not being a part of Indian culture do not understand Indian culture.
In India you will see large metropolitan cities acting as hubs for employment, living and opportunities. Go to villages you see poverty you also see prosperity(Depending on where you go). You will see most advanced technologies to old stone age agriculture methods. At one end you will see farmers in the area of Punjab being the richest of the lot and you will also see farmers committing suicide due to debt and poverty.
You will see people eating stomach full to people barely affording a meal a day.
Amidst all this we have a thriving industry in every domain of business you can imagine. We have the best colleges and universities and we also have a huge problem of illiteracy.
We write software, we have a nuclear weapons program, despite being the worlds most peaceful nation we have one of the largest armies in the world. We have a space program. Yet at the same time we struggle to feed our self.
Our society still has the stains of socialism and communism from the old days. We still have massive corruption and inefficiency in government layers.
Amidst all this parents feels their kids are better off studying and getting good jobs to make a living than doing something like sports which don't offer much incentive to make a comfortable living. There are instances of gold medal winners pawn broking their medals to afford a day's meal.
Also there are not many facilities and training options if you want to be a serious athlete. At the same time we don't believe China kind of policies either.
While you provided an accurate description of the Indian culture, your comment does not address the issue at hand.
The biggest problem according to me lies in the Indian culture; We don't challenge authority enough to pursue our dreams.
In Indian culture most decisions that matter are made for children by their parents. Disobeying your parents has an associated stigma to it. While this being a good thing for holding the families together, and arguably increasing happiness, this can be a deterrent to developing a person's individuality and self confidence.
So while it is difficult for well wishing parents to suggest a high-risk, high-reward path for their children (it's not their dream after all), which involves the child following a sport which he/she is good at, the children's subservience hamper independent thinking required to pursue their dream on their own. IMHO this is the primary cause of the herd mentality that we see so very often in India.
This herd mentality causes a catch22, where prior successes are required in a sport for parent-approved children's participation, and due to lack of participation there aren't any successes.
Of course there are miracles, but unfortunately not very often. For example, I attribute a lot of the participation in cricket and as a result the top class Indian cricket team that we see today, to the miracle named 'Sachin Tendulkar'[1] - one of the best batsmen that the sports has ever seen.
But with the modernization(westernization?) of the Indian culture, things are looking better. Looking at India's history at the Olympics[2], recently we have started seeing successes across a variety of sports - shooting, boxing, and badminton. I hope this trend continues and helps convince more parents to let their children pursue their dreams and not be just another rat in the rat race. And also convince a lot more children that challenging the authority can sometimes be a good thing.
Erm, care to point out a few of the things in the article that are false? I could find none.
The article does not try to explain what India is, but why India doesn't win as many medals in the Olympics as are expected from a nation this big. And it's does a pretty decent job of that IMO.
"It has never won a medal at the winter games" is pretty misleading, given that India is largely a 'summer' country - in fact, it's pretty much just European countries, US and Canada that win medals at the winter Olympics. And while India's been to most of the summer Olympics, it's only been to 8 winters.
If you look at the medals won, it's clear that it's a very eurocentric competition. Apart from China (who go crazy for cold war reasons - the article disingenuously uses cold war countries for comparison), all the high performers are euro culture. Sure, Japan won 400 medals overall... but Germany has 1500... and even Finland has nearly as many summer medals as Japan.
Apart from China, who has invested heavily as a matter of pride, non-euro culture countries generally don't do well.
Jamaica has won zero winter Olympics medals. Same with Brazil, Greece, Iran, Israel, Mexico, the Phillipines, Portugal (I stopped looking around p - check the link above) - all sizeable 'summer' countries with zero winter Olympics medals.
You probably recall the film "Cool Runnings", in which the team did not win; the point was that they were plucky underdogs and did better than expected, but they didn't place.
> Amidst all this parents feels their kids are better off studying and getting good jobs to make a living than doing something like sports which don't offer much incentive to make a comfortable living.
Seems reasonable to me (but I went, studied, and got a good job instead of going to sports).
I disagree, the US just isn't that different. Yes, theres small pockets of intense difference, often composed of first and second generation immigrants, but otherwise "American" culture is fairly homogeneous thanks to mass media.
India is huge country. Huge, I mean so huge that it will be difficult to truly explain the diversity we have here. It will be easy for a German to explain what Germany is, Or French to explain what France is and so on. But it will be very difficult for an Indian to explain what India is in totality basically because there are thousands of cultures, ways of lives, languages, people of ethnic origin, color, language, religion and so on and so forth. In fact any form of classification that you can come up to we have diverse categories in that.
This is not true for China. Or Korea or Thailand. Because they are a single ethnic group. People who talk of deficiencies or things not being a part of Indian culture do not understand Indian culture.
In India you will see large metropolitan cities acting as hubs for employment, living and opportunities. Go to villages you see poverty you also see prosperity(Depending on where you go). You will see most advanced technologies to old stone age agriculture methods. At one end you will see farmers in the area of Punjab being the richest of the lot and you will also see farmers committing suicide due to debt and poverty.
You will see people eating stomach full to people barely affording a meal a day.
Amidst all this we have a thriving industry in every domain of business you can imagine. We have the best colleges and universities and we also have a huge problem of illiteracy.
We write software, we have a nuclear weapons program, despite being the worlds most peaceful nation we have one of the largest armies in the world. We have a space program. Yet at the same time we struggle to feed our self.
Our society still has the stains of socialism and communism from the old days. We still have massive corruption and inefficiency in government layers.
Amidst all this parents feels their kids are better off studying and getting good jobs to make a living than doing something like sports which don't offer much incentive to make a comfortable living. There are instances of gold medal winners pawn broking their medals to afford a day's meal.
Also there are not many facilities and training options if you want to be a serious athlete. At the same time we don't believe China kind of policies either.