"Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies." — NelsonMandela
Why My Father Hated India
81–90 of 120 posts
Re: Why My Father Hated India
#82One of the things that consistently puzzle me is how different cultures handle change. Over the past 150 years, the world has seen all kinds of terrible wars, killing hundreds of millions of people and causing all sorts of hatred and ill will. Some of these cultures get up, dust themselves off, and go on -- sometimes achieving greatness. Other cultures, sometimes with far less injustice done (if you can measure these…
Couldn't agree more. However, for Pakistan and it's people, hatred towards India is a way of life. That's their inspiration, that's what they live up to. They possibly don't have any economic, social or technical goals to look up to. In such a scenario they naturally turns to religion and religious leaders feed this hatred mantra. Hence hatred becomes their living breath. Of course, this is all hearsay and I haven't personally been to Pakistan to witness any such feelings.
Re: Why My Father Hated India
#83One of the things that consistently puzzle me is how different cultures handle change. Over the past 150 years, the world has seen all kinds of terrible wars, killing hundreds of millions of people and causing all sorts of hatred and ill will. Some of these cultures get up, dust themselves off, and go on -- sometimes achieving greatness. Other cultures, sometimes with far less injustice done (if you can measure these…
Total guess for this particular case (but I've seen it over and over). If you're well off, not getting genocided, etc you past wrongs don't bother much. If not, then past wrongs are what you blame for you're cured Ty shitty situation.
Re: Why My Father Hated India
#84Being a Pakistani (and Punjabi) American myself, I do not agree with some of the views the author puts forward. First, Pakistanis do define themselves primarily as 'non-Indians'. However, the view that Pakistan has somehow carved out a new identity is the past 60 years is false. 5,000 years of shared heredity, language, customs and political history don't shake off that easily. Even Pakistanis and their relationship…
I am sorry, but I have to disagree strongly with the assertion that Indian Muslims have suffered under "majority" rule. First of all: 3 of the first 11 presidents in India were Muslim. Muslims continue to do well in many spheres of life: all of the top Bollywood actors are Muslim. At one time, the richest Indian was a Muslim (he's come down a few notches because of the Ambani brothers), and he rose up through entrepr…
The President in India is a figurehead. No real power. How many PMs have been Muslim? Chief ministers? Riiigh.
> top Bollywood actors are Muslim
How is this an indication of how good Muslims are? This is like saying most athletes in the US are black, so African Americans are doing great in America.
> "some animosity towards Muslims"
Selective memory here.
Re: Why My Father Hated India
#85One of the things that consistently puzzle me is how different cultures handle change. Over the past 150 years, the world has seen all kinds of terrible wars, killing hundreds of millions of people and causing all sorts of hatred and ill will. Some of these cultures get up, dust themselves off, and go on -- sometimes achieving greatness. Other cultures, sometimes with far less injustice done (if you can measure these…
Harvard Professor Robert Putnam's study showed that the more racially diverse a society is, the lower the levels of trust. http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/t...
Well, I don't know about that but Somalia seems like an example that goes against that rule. They have had no stable government since 1991 and been fighting ever since yet they all belong to the same tribe, they speak the same language and are all of the same religion.
Re: Why My Father Hated India
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't get upvoted and be featured on the top page of Hacker News if people are not finding it useful. Hacker News is not a website to be defined by you on what is interesting and what is relevant. You are just one of thousands of people visiting this site and it will stay like that - if you find that non-interesting, it is irrelevant.
Oh, why the venom? I'm an Indian, and I personally found it interesting (though it tells me nothing new) but I find it irrelevant to what HN is. Like I mentioned in the reply above, geo-political news is irrelevant to HN discussion unless it has a direct bearing upon startups/programming. I miss the link here.
See http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, first section. It may not have been news to you, but some of it was news to me. And definitely interesting.
Re: Why My Father Hated India
#87One of the things that consistently puzzle me is how different cultures handle change. Over the past 150 years, the world has seen all kinds of terrible wars, killing hundreds of millions of people and causing all sorts of hatred and ill will. Some of these cultures get up, dust themselves off, and go on -- sometimes achieving greatness. Other cultures, sometimes with far less injustice done (if you can measure these…
Total guess for this particular case (but I've seen it over and over). If you're well off, not getting genocided, etc you past wrongs don't bother much. If not, then past wrongs are what you blame for you're cured Ty shitty situation.
The perceived likelihood of success makes an impact as well, I think. For example, much of my family were Pontian Greeks from the Black Sea coast, and at one point their attitude was very similar to that of Palestinians--- commitment to regaining the lost homeland and reconstituting their former nation, anger at expulsion, etc.
After the 1920s or so, that sort of irredentist sentiment slowly waned as it became clear that Greece was never getting any of Asia Minor back, so there was really no point in spending your life with that as your goal; might as well just learn standard modern Greek and integrate into Greek society. But I can imagine an alternate history where Pontian Greeks are living in neighboring Greece in refugee camps, considering it only a temporary location while agitating to recover their homeland.
Re: Why My Father Hated India
#88I found this article extremely interesting. If you haven't watched the 'beating retreat ceremony' video, make sure you do, it's one of the most bizarre things I've ever seen.
It's actually rather fun to watch in person, though I can understand why you think it's bizarre. It's, as far as I can see, really ceremonial - though it remains a big deal for the security forces personnel involved.
Re: Why My Father Hated India
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Harvard Professor Robert Putnam's study showed that the more racially diverse a society is, the lower the levels of trust. http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/t...
Is there some empirical measure of "the degree to which someone should actually be trusted," and if so, are the racially diverse societies less trustful than they should be, or are the racially homogeneous societies moreso than they should be?
It might be worth noting that there's another possibility besides those. Perhaps people actually are less trustworthy in more racially-diverse societies, in which case it needn't be the case either that the more diverse societies aren't trusting enough or that the less diverse societies are too trusting.
... How plausible is that? Dunno. In a racially-diverse society, especially a poorly integrated one, people of different races might well tend not to treat one another in ways worthy of trust. But it's complicated: they might also be more reliable towards others of the same race. In such a society, anyway, there'd be no such thing as "the degree to which someone should actually be trusted" because it would depend on who's considering trusting whom. Not to mention, e.g., that in such a society there could be a lot of divergence between how much you "should" trust someone else for your own sake (less) and how much you "should" trust them to help fix the messed-up state of society (more), etc., etc., etc.
Some things that aren't clear to me about Putnam's work, and that seem important: In racially diverse societies, is it only inter-race levels of trust that are lower? Putnam's work, IIUC, is concerned with the USA; are things different in places where there isn't a history of slavery? or where racial diversity on something like equal terms has been going on for longer? What actually happens over time in these less-trusting more-diverse places? Is it specifically highly-visible racial diversity (black, white, ...) that is associated with these differences in trust, or do you get the same thing with religious or cultural diversity that doesn't have quite such visible markers?
Oh, I can answer one of those. According to http://abstractnonsense.wordpress.com/2006/10/09/ethnic-dive... Putnam found that intraracial trust is less in more-diverse settings, as well as interracial trust. That's a shame.
Re: Why My Father Hated India
#90One of the things that consistently puzzle me is how different cultures handle change. Over the past 150 years, the world has seen all kinds of terrible wars, killing hundreds of millions of people and causing all sorts of hatred and ill will. Some of these cultures get up, dust themselves off, and go on -- sometimes achieving greatness. Other cultures, sometimes with far less injustice done (if you can measure these…
Couldn't agree more. However, for Pakistan and it's people, hatred towards India is a way of life. That's their inspiration, that's what they live up to. They possibly don't have any economic, social or technical goals to look up to. In such a scenario they naturally turns to religion and religious leaders feed this hatred mantra. Hence hatred becomes their living breath. Of course, this is all hearsay and I haven't…
I am 4 short of 500 karma, so I can't give you a downvote - instead, I make this comment. I'm an Indian, and I find it very hard to believe that an entire nation unequivocally hates another country. Firstly, there are plenty of educated, curious and free-thinking Pakistanis who bear no such hatred toward India - just read the blogs in the Dawn website. Second, among those who aren't educated nearly well enough, I imagine that the preoccupation with day-to-day survival is far more important to them than the hatred that they are told they should feel toward a remote enemy.
On a meta note, why is this still on the front page? This is worse than politics - any discussion of this will devolve into vague statements(in the absence of actual knowledge or data) about how one country is better than the other and then rapidly into name-calling and jingoism. I hope we can keep this type of story away from HN.