Thought Blog

An edited copy of a mail I recently sent -- sorry for bias for India -- it was counter to the anti-Indian and pro-Western bias of the receipient.
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--- xyz@gmail.com wrote:

> i repeat: some (all) indians still lack the *conscious* ability of
> self-critique, self-improvement by negative feedback, intellectual thought
> etc they are always bathing in the drug-like effects of positive feedback
> and self-aggrandizing and surrouinding oneself with praising people, which
> would have been ok, if not for the animal like existence it entails with
> total lack of improvement over the long term, maybe deterioration
> too.stillit is king mentality i am great. like an old film star who
> still thinks
> he/she is a star but actually is ignored.
> some uniconscious intelligence (though negligible in long term) is there in
> small amouts so they move to foreign countries, realizing futility of stay
> in india be it with their suffering parents who call them back who are
> ignored to be left to die "alone" in India or come to US.

You should immediately remove the term "intellectual thought" from your first sentence. For example, how were we able to develop into the leading country in all intellectual domains until the western enlightenment in the 17th century?

You should read this:

http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Panini.html
http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/HistTopics/Indian_mathematics.html
http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/HistTopics/Indian_sulbasutras.html
http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Bhaskara_II.html
http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0301078
http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0310001
http://www.ece.lsu.edu/kak/hist.html

Basically, we have always been centuries ahead of the west in maths, astronomy, spirituality, psychology, and possibly most of the intellectual domains; until the 17th century, of course.

If the culture is severely flawed and cannot even self-critique (which is the basic attribute of intelligence), how could it have developed all this so early, _centuries_ and _millenia_ before anybody else?

You are only looking at the current Indian culture, which has flaws, due to what I feel are the effects of population, and other geographical factors, and the flawed merge between the West and the Indian cultures.

And also, you are not looking at the best of Indian culture -- you are looking at problems, you are missing the merits: your western psychological training has trained you to look at the mind as a machination, with a tendency to get flawed. But because of this, you are unable to see the positive sides of the mind. You get egoistic pleasure in believing and telling that most people are essentially flawed. Once egoistic pleasure comes in the middle, you cannot think straight. (Same applies to me).

The Western psychologists have only recently started to look at positive psychology. The American Psych Assoc (APA)'s president Seligman realized around 2000 that something very significant was amiss in western psychology, and started a conference/field of positive psychology, where they try to understand and promote human happiness instead of the traditional way to reduce unhappiness.

A must-read:
http://www.apa.org/apags/profdev/pospsyc.html

Now I believe that the Western Psychology will understand happiness and positive emotions better; and they will come up with something similar to spirituality -- present in the Indian religion/culture/philosophy since millenia.

My subjective feeling that: Put India on an isolated island, and you will see they would emerge with true happiness (not that they will be remain in happy state completely, but they will reach a sustaining cultural state, which would support fulfillment of the conscious mind's ultimate desires of meaning and belonging).