WHY HAS THE WEST PROGRESSED SO MUCH MORE THAN INDIA SINCE THE 1940s ?

By 2014 I had spent decades trying to improve the circumstances i found around me in India, for the public good. Both professionally and in my own time / resources. Including giving an entire year, 20 hours a day work for a new political party that we all hoped would address the corruption and low level of governance in our country.

But I could see we were not able to make the change we wanted to. Sure, India has improved in so many ways (including now touching base with the South pole of the moon !) but we still have enormous poverty, hunger, lack of medical care, natural environment that is not cared for, and a low level of governance in most areas of life : urban planning, support to small farmers, job creation, and so on.

At the same time, I had read intensively on what happened in Europe during WW2 and realized how devastated were most european countries at the end of the war. Yet, they had picked themselves up from their bootstraps and their success of most of the countries was for everyone to see.

So my family and I decided to tour the english speaking countries first (except the US and Canada where friends and family had lived for long and we had more feedback). So we went in 2014 to the UK and Singapore (as a South-East Asian inspiration, closer to home), and in 2015 to New Zealand and Australia, to find answers to some questions. Ofcourse this was impressionistic, not a study per se, but surely that counts too. From 2017 onwards we visited Europe too.

We found that farmers were under stress in the UK and Europe too. Many committed suicide because of business failures. But we could see farmers had more support from their governments than in India.

Everyone we met performed some civic duties - their kept their neighbourhoods clean, helped the poor, volunteered at church. We would imagine the percentage of those we knew back home helping others, to be lower.

It was not true that family bonds were weaker in the west we felt.. Everywhere we saw, parents doted on children.. we saw them playing for long periods in public gardens with their children.. north indian parents (whom i have lived amidst) do not seem to spend that much direct time with their children. We saw children and grandchildren supporting grandparents in going to church, or assisting them at farm or with various tasks.

Ofcourse there were gory pieces in UK tabloids of some parent leaving young children locked at home alone, and so on.. but there are plenty of fathers in north india who beat children violently under influence of liquor and so on...

Everywhere we visited in the developed world we saw the rule of law, cleanliness, orderliness, a predictability to life, which was very relaxing.. one could breathe deeper. Indian cities in contrast cause tension when you step out.. because of the noise, disorderly traffic, and lack of normal conveniences of sufficient public transport, smooth pavements to walk on, and so on.

Ofcourse there may still be big-ticket corruption in the West, but it does not always affect residents in an everyday sort of way.

So we felt that there were cultural factors at play here that we needed to know more about. 

The False Notions Peddled in India about Westerners

This is a fantastic story of a woman who started giving away excess garden produce for free and then others started also leaving their excess produce for others - poor or just sharing people, to take as they need. Lou Ridsdale started "Food is Free" 6 years ago in Ballarat in  Victoria and its still going strong.

Our friend sent this little video from Australia. 

I had never bothered to travel abroad before 2014... I was also told by elders that all civilization, all culture, all history, was really only in India, and not elsewhere ! 

I bought the crux of this thinking, but began to Q this recieved wisdom when about ten years ago, i deeply read about WW2 and its aftermath in Europe. 

Mainland Europe - and Britain, were in 1945 at the end of the war, bombed out ruins over large parts.. Agriculture, sewage, water systems, train stations and bridges were destroyed.. 

1 % British, 6 % of Austrians, 8 % of Germans, 9 % of Greeks and Yugoslav people and 17 % Poles were dead as a result of the war. 

All other countries in Europe had also lost large nos. of their people. 

There were large food shortages in Europe towards the end of the war and after it, even resulting in mass starvation in a few countries.

India had suffered too ofcourse, with 2 million dead in the Bengal famine in 1943 because of British mismanagement, and a further 2 million dead during the partition riots in 1947 (0.5 % of the population of undivided India). 

A lakh soldiers from India had also perished in WW2, fighting on the British side. 

So Europe set to rebuilt itself, and so did India, 2 years apart - 1945 and 1947. But the difference, even between the poorer economies of East Europe, and India, is vast. Even if they did have a head start on industrialization, and had exploited other regions of the world, this did not fully explain to me, why we were so much behind.

I decided to travel to these countries to get a better sense of this.. so my family and I went to England, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and mainland Europe in different trips from 2014-2017. These were in the nature of study tours.. I had Qs I wanted answered.

Ofcourse these trips of 2 weeks each to a country were too small for in-depth study, but I did get some answers to Qs on farming, attitude to water supplies, degraded land, and the work ethic. And public transportation systems, urban planning et al..

But the most important learnings were about people.. I had been told Westerners did not value family life - which was patently false in my experience. The people we met also had meaningful friendships where they did a great deal to help each other out. 

Most impressive was, that I have not met a single person in these nations who DID NOT volunteer frequently for causes they believed in.

The very elderly also in New Zealand and Britain, some of them on wheelchairs, volunteered in churches, changing flowers, guiding people, and collecting money to train guide dogs to help disabled people.

See for yourself the close parallels between India's leadership now, and Germany's leadership before WW2..

An instructive exchange with a neighbour :

[12:34 PM, 3/3/2019] Neighbour : If Modi has not done anything the public must be fools to have elected him as CM repeatedly followed by PM.

[12:37 PM, 3/3/2019] Me : Good lord - surely history has told you that being popular for a time is no proof of the right intent ? Hitler was the most popular leader in germany for more than a decade. he also justified what he did in the name of the national interest and the german people believed him.

[12:39 PM, 3/3/2019] Me : as you would have surely read, goondas are very good at winning elections repeatedly - career criminals. that is why there are so many of them in most political parties. their winning constitutes proof for you on how good they are for our country ?

[12:40 PM, 3/3/2019] Neighbour : Wrong analogy - the favourite one of Congress supporters. Was Hitler democratically elected the first time?

[12:41 PM, 3/3/2019] Me : yes. in elections. he had most of the socialists then in power, murdered on the quiet by private militia.

[12:42 PM, 3/3/2019] Me : no, it isnt a cheap analogy. i have studied some aspects of nazi thought and find modi - and RSS are devout followers. the hindu right wing supported nazi germany and appealed to hitler to attack india to dislodge the british !

[12:44 PM, 3/3/2019] Neighbour: So did another nationaL icon Bose. Nothing wrong if served national interest .

[12:46 PM, 3/3/2019] Me : you cannot speak of Bose and the Hindu right in the same breath ! The Hindu rights' interest was in a final solution of muslims in india. Bose wanted independence, impatient with Gandhi's slow methods. you can speak of Bhagat Singh and Bose together.

[12:47 PM, 3/3/2019] Me : The hindu right NEVER PARTICIPATED - NOT ONE BIT, IN INDIA'S FREEDOM STRUGGLE. Instead they fomented riots in the decades preceeding partition alongside muslim league. 

[1:02 PM, 3/3/2019] Me : Congress opposed partition till the very last. the only elected goernnment to officially endorse the creation of Pakistan was Savarkar's some years before partition. Please read.

 [6:14 PM, 3/3/2019] Me : Since you asked a Q on how he came to rule over the German people, here is a brief cartoon video on the career of Hitler. I think it is a must see for those influenced by the Hindu Right – you can see for yourself the close analogies between Modi and Hitler, and RSS and Nazi thought here. It is not for nothing that scholars have drawn parallels between them for the past many decades. 

Part 2, 8 min long, is a must see.

If you have the time, see part 1 too. It is 6 min long.

Commentary on a noble song..

This song was sent over whatsapp :

Hamne Suna tha Ek hai Bharat - DIDI 1959

It’s a noble song that puts most india’s ills to having been under foreign domination. i dont agree though.. this is the misinformation I have heard from elders all my life. I don’t think all the distortions in india can be traced to british rule or muslim rule. Muslim rule lasted over parts of india for 600 years (till the middle of the 18^th century) and company / british rule for 200 years. But caste inequalities are millenia old.

Muslim rule over Spain and Portugal also persisted for over 700 years until the end of the 15^th century – but they have taken their own future in their hands since, have they not ? I think our country suffers as we have made (and continue to) too little effort to include all Indians in our effort to develop. We have continued to encourage income inequality which remains the HIGHEST in the world save the middle east. The top 10 % of the Indian population earned 55 % of the income in 2016. In Europe the share of the top 10 % was 37 %. After world war 2, the Governments in Europe built big welfare states, with generous jobless benefits, child subsidies and income support. Such benefits became the most important instruments for reducing inequality there.

The song also says it will take time for india to develop.. The WW2 ended just 2 years before india got her freedom. Europe suffered far more war, deaths, destruction of cities and countryside alike, and continuing occupation by a foreign power (USSR) of a large part of europe.. yet what have they built and achieved since then, and what have we ?

The achievements of europe are not just material – though ofcourse those are there to see. Germany had killed, ravaged, pillaged, large swathes of Europe. In return she and her allies had suffered extensive destruction. But after the war, Governments worked to encourage emotional healing between countries and communities, as did the Church and NGOs. They succeeded and the result of that was the European Union. In our country though we are following the opposite path – we are increasing divides between religions and communities.