India

Subject: India 

Perhaps the problem with India is India itself. A vast ill defined mystical place rooted in a complex religion with a code of social etiquette that surpasses understanding in the 21st century. India is vast,  it covers an area larger than Europe with a population of 1.3 billion compared to Europe's 0.74 billion but its social structure, with millions of people designated untouchable and the sharp demarcation in what people can do for a living which sets the continents dramatically apart.
The definition of Indian nationalism is a misnomer given the sense of separatism within the country, its system of the Caste, (Untouchable' to the 'Priestly) these  labels dictate, down to the smallest detail what a person can do and what is expected of them. 
It's a nation ceaselessly exchanging banalities with itself, expressing the old world of myth and magic and then trying to interpret the new with the old. These Caste divisions and the holy contempt of high for low have no place in a modern society. The modern reforming mind will not be allowed to play on the problems of the country as long as the mystics hold sway on the mind of the people. The 'ritual' of Indian life smothers the imagination and the strict caste structure ensures  conformity to the Hindu vision regarding fitness to uphold a position.
The informality we in the West hold regarding our birth right (other than the Etonian, another form of churchy magic) allows us to think freely about all things but if Divine Providence  has its hold on society then this distortion will dictate events.
Indians are proud of their ancient religion but they are also its victim. They accept that things are as they are because of what religion says about some matter, some ancient religious text, not the  political vision needed to improve matters. They blanket themselves in this acceptance of the human trauma experienced by so many in their society, unwilling to dismember the parts of the Hindu teaching which sustain it and unwilling even to acknowledge what the word 'society' means in its national sense. There can be no sense of a nation if the nation is so easily compartmentalised, so easily divided by divine diktat, if the depravation which they see each day doesn't make them question the religious right to do so, then there is little hope.
India is fragmented, not just the fragmentation of religion and caste but the institutionalised fragmentation of a country with no intellectual current flowing within it, no developing inner life of its own. It is the fragmentation of country without an idea of how a graded but interlinked society works.
There was an overarching  concept that through independence, India and the Indian way of life had triumphed over the decadent West. The structure of Indian life was sufficient, as it had  always had been, dating at least two thousand years before the West emerged from its primitive beginnings but in today's world, the magic of tradition and social prejudice is not enough. The technological revolution and the rise of Indian billionaires is also not enough if the country does not fashion a sense that Indians are part of a whole entity and bound by a nations sense of nationhood. The clerical worker who sees his job not as a means to an end but an end in it's self, the forms pile up exemplifying  the petty bureaucracy which created the job in the first place. The sweeper who sweeps the street, not with an eye to cleaning the street but rather to fill each hour with the appearance of doing so.
Add to this the corruption, the staggering figure of 92% of the people living in India who experience the need to bribe or pay a 'baksheesh' to get a job done or shift an application for bureaucratic approval. This interdependency of a personal payment cuts to the heart of india's lack of a national ethic based on centralised or provincial governance. The politicians are just as corrupt, as are the municipal bodies and quasi councils such as that which run the multi billion dollar cricket association. The power of the deal maker with the upfront promise of corrupting backhanders distorts Indians sense of a national and ethical probity , where ones pride of country was sufficient reason to play. Fortunes are made in the betting industry feeding off a players dropped catch, or failing to run properly between the wicket and misfielding on the boundary.
Money is god, without it you are nothing. Hear the wealthy people berating their servants or the chief clerk berating his subordinates or his subordinate shouting at the sweeper and you will see the true face of India.
An India which protects the sacred cow whilst promoting its nuclear industry is a very strange mix indeed.