Looking at instances of bad behaviour and attributing that to a country's culture has become a fad among who else? Indians.
Take for e.g. his citing of Max Weber:
Max Weber explained the success of capitalism in the US, Germany and Britain as coming from their populations’ Protestant faith. This ethic, or culture, was missing from the Catholic populations of South America, Italy and Spain. Protestants, Weber said, extended Christianity’s message of doing good deeds, to doing work well. Industry and enterprise had an ultimate motive: public good. That explains the philanthropists of the US, from John D. Rockefeller to Andrew Carnegie to Bill Gates.
To take a few outstanding individuals and attribute that to the general population is nothing but a general fallacy of implying causation by correlation which doesn't seem to be a
new thing to the author himself.
Next he says, "Some characterestics unite Indians. The most visible is our oppurtunism." How can oppurtunism ever unite anyone?
Next:
One good way to judge a society is to see it in motion. On the road, we observe the opportunism in the behaviour of the Indian driver. Where traffic halts on one side of the road in India, motorists will encroach the oncoming side because there is space available there. If that leads to both sides being blocked, that is fine, as long as we maintain our advantage over people behind us or next to us. This is because the other man cannot be trusted to stay in his place.
Mr Aakar, did you even spend time thinking why it might be so? Before giving marks of decency to people in other countries, did you think that this could be related to the fact that those countries have better traffic management or better roadways in the firstplace? Please don't jump to any conclusion about the mentality of the driver, even in your overenthusiastic tone of deriding your own country.
What follows is more such examples and finally an attribution of all the problems to the major religion, Hinduism. Even though religion is probably the last thing on anybody trying to make a living.
The author 'opportunistically' misses the fact that a lot impatience we show is mostly due to the limited resources we have which leads to the 'zero-sum-game' mentality.
Perhaps the biggest problem we have is a lack of national pride which encourages authors like 'Aakar Patel' to write articles like those. We are also too tolerant a society to condone such writings. Clearly, he was oppurtunistic in that regard.
Blame that on the culture, man!
