What does the world think of India?
What does the world think of India?
I am an Indian and I have noticed that Indians are way too proud of their country for some reason and at the same time lack any civic sense towards it, they are extremely loud and extremely proud. We feel like the world revolves around India and our culture is superior to that of others. Also, a considerable chunk of the population has been sold the "India is a world-leader" myth and they think India is somehow leading the world in innovation, science and technology, human development etc.,
Now, I know for a fact that this is not true, when I try to gauge the perception of Indians abroad on Twitter, I get pretty negative results, but Twitter has nothing good to say about any group of people, so... I kinda wanted to know what you people though of India, don't base it upon the etnic Indians who might be your friends and are decent people, but base it upon the news you read, the stories you hear from those Indians, etc.
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One of the largest countries in the world and a hell of a lot of ethnic diversity, so it's hard to make generalizations. Kerala and, say, UP are very different. But here's my attempt.
Geopolitically as an entity it's currently suffering from some of the same things the world's other largest countries (China, US, Indonesia) are suffering from - namely: populist leaders and a large group of poorly educated people in the population propping them up.
Consequently there is way too much militant nationalism and complacency about aggression towards other nations, territorialism, persecution of certain ethnic minorities, religious fundamentalism. All the biggest countries have those traits at the moment, so it's not specifically a reflection on India.
In terms of resource and development it's dealing with a similar situation to other ex colony LICs - years of resource exploitation left it with a low GDP per capita and consequently major challenges when it comes to provision of infrastructure (eg pollution management), health, education, living standards etc.
India has made huge strides in the past but the current wave of populism relies on leveraging social conflict (as it does elsewhere in the eorld) so I think that growth has slowed. For the same reason the fault lines along ethnic, religious, caste lines - which colonialism entrenched or deepened within the region - are still a big aspect.
My personal experiences with Indian people is that just like from anywhere else there are good and bad. Cultured, well educated people are easier to deal with because there is more shared knowledge. Statistically speaking, many of the world's worst arseholes you are going to meet are going to be from India, China and the US, and that holds up.
I am not sure of assholes. I think they distribute evenly across all nations. On the other side those countries tend to be specifically nationalistic. Russia would also go in this cluster, but it is much more seldom to meet Russians these days in Europe or the US. I just want to add that India has the huge advantage that a lot of people can speak some kind of English. Most with a strong accent, but the percentage of English speaking Indians is very high compared to china, Korea, Japan.
I think arseholes are distributed evenly too.
If 5% of all people are arseholes, everywhere, then a country with 50 million people has 2.5 million arseholes. But a country with 1,428,000,000 people has over 71 million arseholes. This is why they seem to be over represented by the large nations.
You are right that we are more likely to notice them if they travel near us or communicate in a language we understand. This is why Estonians are more likely to think badly of Finns whereas South Africans are more likely to think badly of Nigerians.