{"id":349,"date":"2005-06-27T13:39:26","date_gmt":"2005-06-27T08:09:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/2005\/06\/27\/what-indians-think-of-the-us\/"},"modified":"2005-06-27T13:39:26","modified_gmt":"2005-06-27T08:09:26","slug":"what-indians-think-of-the-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/classic\/200506\/what-indians-think-of-the-us\/","title":{"rendered":"What Indians think of the US"},"content":{"rendered":"

I confess that I am utterly puzzled by the results of the Pew global attitudes survey<\/a> (via Acorn<\/a>) which says that Indians have an overwhelmingly positive attitude towards the United States. Apparently 71% of us like them. <\/p>\n

Is that plausible? Yes, the survey is skewed. India is one of the few countries where they have asked only urbanites. But this means that it is skewed in a way that makes it easy for us to subject it to a smell test. I am afraid it doesn’t pass, which is why I am utterly puzzled.
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\nI just cannot believe that Indians have that kind of positive attitude towards Americans. Most people I know are extremely cynical about their motives. As to how cynical, I’d guess that they’d rather trust the Chinese over the Americans. I’ve gotten into arguments with people where I have said that we should, on pragmatic grounds<\/i>, make a limited alliance <\/i> with the Americans because we have a common enemy in this case<\/i> – only to be confronted by “We should be very careful about them. Have you forgotten what happened when we trusted the East India Company?” I don’t think this view is limited to a vocal minority. My impression is that this attitude is widespread. I can think of only two explanations to the results. <\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The questions were asked by a foreginer. Naturally, we gave those answers so as not to offend them. But this is highly unlikely. If the organization has any sense, it will correct for this.\n<\/li>\n
  2. We really do admire them, but in the same way that robber barons are admired. As someone whose tactics we wish we could emulate, but can’t because our stupid morals are holding us back. I can confirm that this attitude to life was widespread when I was growing up – “The only way to succeed in life is to adopt underhanded means”. As usual, I blame this on Socialism.\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I confess that I am utterly puzzled by the results of the Pew global attitudes survey (via Acorn) which says that Indians have an overwhelmingly positive attitude towards the United States. Apparently 71% of us like them. Is that plausible? Yes, the survey is skewed. India is one of the few countries where they have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349"}],"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=349"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}