It does not help that the dominant religion thinks of truth and morality as extremely subjective.
All of this leads to a very low trust society where each person is only for themselves and their families. So it is not at all surprising that the biggest cities where people live in extremely densely populated clusters turn out to be extremely unlivable places.
My experience growing up in India is that we are extremely tolerant of corruption and self aggrandisement. In fact, people speak of envy and admiration of folks working in govt who even takes bribes even to issue death and birth certificate.
The corruption of the profession of teachers and doctors is something I've witnessed myself. In just the last 20 years, no one in my village shows any respect for both of them. Things were very different when I was a kid.
Personally I do believe that ours is a very cynical, low trust and 'corrupt' society. Though southern India is much better than North (especially the Ganges planes).
I don't know what the answer is, but good luck, India. We're all hoping you can solve this.
Would like to learn more about this.
This is categorically false.
It all stems from the general phenomenon of Indians still being stuck in the subsistence mindset - including those who don't need to. This is because 1) unlike the US and Europe, (almost all of) India has never had a nontrivial period of continuous and consistent economic security, and 2) The country has a MASSIVE load of "liability" population of a size ridiculously disproportionate to the "asset" population, despite having the largest youth count in the world.
India is one of the very rare wonder countries that would have fared much better (nonviolently) balkanized.
But it makes me wonder how they get foreign diplomats to be stationed in Delhi? Westerners don't accept 200+ AQI.
Our grandparents did: https://waterandpower.org/museum/Smog_in_Early_Los_Angeles.h... https://www.fastcompany.com/90909054/the-origin-story-of-the...
[0] https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/toxicity-15-o...
It tasted like what I imagine a finely aged glass of acid rain would taste like.
You know how when you open the weather app on your phone, in normal places it says things like: sunny, cloudy, rainy? The weather app just showed SMOKE (this was an actual weather report).
This is partially a result of agricultural burning in the surrounding states which is one of the fastest (and cheapest) ways to clear out the fields for the next crop.
This is primarily because most of the problems have their roots in the very flexible mindset Indians tend to adopt; it's basically the antithesis of the "Deutsche Bahn" issue pointed out in another HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46419970.
joemazerino•2h ago