There are some values that run through a culture, values that the culture holds to be very “important”. For example, sexual conservatism is a value that runs through most cultures with a high religious quotient. This post is about a couple of such “values” that the Indian Culture is quite saturated with.
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\nOne of them is: humility. Consider its converse counterpart, arrogance. In the typical Indian society, it’s considered a fairly evil thing to be arrogant. For example, when Jayalalitha was first booted\/routed out in the election after her numerous corruption cases, many an opinion poll of the people revealed that the principal gripe of people was that she was arrogant<\/i>. That’s right, here was a chief minister who was so manifestly corrupt, and people felt that her arrogance was the most important issue.<\/p>\n
We all have this ingrained into our psyche, right from our childhoods really:
\nthat humility is one of the most important “values”.<\/p>\n
It ranks way up there along with our other protagonist – self-sacrifice – in the list of must-have values. Take any Hindi movie, and the “hero” would have at least one or two self-sacrifices to don in his cap. He’d selflessly sacrifice his love, his wealth, his well-being for some vaguo thing and that’s why he’d be called a hero.<\/p>\n
Now I believe that it is these two “values” that are responsible for much of the degradation in Indian Society. <\/p>\n
Over-obsequiousness, self-effasement, societal unimportance accorded to qualities like entrepreneurship and risk-taking, an overwhelming emasculation<\/i> of society. And of course – socialism.<\/p>\n
Regarding humility – all I want to point out is a statement by Sherlock Holmes in one of his books, where he puts down humility quite simply – if to lie or to shade the truth is considered bad, why should shading the truth about one-self be considered good?<\/p>\n
Regarding self-sacrifice, I hardly need to repeat the familiar Ayn-Rand arguments of the evils that shall result from a culture that values self-sacrifice very highly. The suppressing of merit, the demotivation and languidity, the works.<\/p>\n
If you look at it, the evils and utopian-idealism of these two “values” quite mirror the evils and utopian-idealism of socialism. Frankly, I’d say that it’s these two values that are far more responsible than Nehru or our cheery CPI comrades for our society being sucked into the cesspool of socialism. If we want to wean the Indian society off socialism, we’ve to wean it off these two values first.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There are some values that run through a culture, values that the culture holds to be very “important”. For example, sexual conservatism is a value that runs through most cultures with a high religious quotient. This post is about a couple of such “values” that the Indian Culture is quite saturated with.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}