In a lot of the US (maybe even most of it?) you get called a traitor or unAmerican or whatever for not agreeing with the government or the Republicans or whoever is in power and control of the media at the moment.
Even in more liberal places in the US, there are often unstated limits to what you can talk about ("saying X is maybe ok, but Y is just ridiculous/crazy/anti-blah").
Outside the US, I certainly see this kind of nationalism in many other countries, such as Israel and China to name a couple.
So they are more than aware of corruption and poor governance. Except - they have tired of the doomsday predictions heard since 1947. The down votes are probably because the 'cancer' symptoms are brought up ad nauseum in Western outlets as reasons India (as if its a simple monolith) failed.
Like pg said for startups: If you feel that you will fail, you stop working and then that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I think this applies to a country's psyche too, like it does to founders.
I think you are exemplifying my point. The appropriate response is to say that she's wrong, not that she's disloyal or beyond the pale.
Edit: he->she
I can't tell you how I feel when I walk by a child slaving in a teashop. That child doesn't know the meaning of loyal dissent. That child doesn't have people speaking up for him/her. That child needs to have a future and I am willing to spend a large part of my life trying to give them one. However, in order to do that you need to see the truth.
I have not written a single opinion in that post except for the observation that this state is slowly disintegrating and although I might be wrong I have tried to prop it up with data. If you feel hurt by it then I am sorry, but this is what the cards are and I would rather spend my time deciding how to play the hand.
> when I walk by a child slaving in a teashop.
You know quite well that child labor is illegal in India and we have a huge enforcement problem. When you walk by such a child, why don't you report this to the cops? Why don't you pass on this information to CRY or some such NGO. Have you tried speaking to the guy who employs the kid and tried to get the child enrolled in some school?
My point precisely is that as a dispassionate observer, you are not doing anything to solve the problem. I will state why I believe there is reason for hope.
When I had gone to get my driver's license in Hyderabad, I was turned down on the pretext of not knowing some archaic clauses because I did not come through an agent and hence had not bribed the person incharge. However, next time round, there was a redhat system on which I had to give my test (no more answering questions to some guy). Now there is a very clean smooth system with very little scope of corruption.
A billion plus population and a poor one at that will lead to chaos. To jump from that to a country disintegrating calls for quite a leap of faith. I highly doubt that there has been a study of failed states to definitively conclude that your figures lead directly to a disintegrating state.
I think that you ought to read Collapse(see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose_... by Jared Diamond ). Whatever he has written is so profound that I still haven't finished the book i.e. I need time to assimilate it in. You see, everything is a part of a complex chain of causality and in order to figure out anything while avoiding infinite recursion we need to create mental models of those interconnections and analyze upon that. I can't go into the data ad infinitum to prove the point. I need to pick up blocks of concepts and hold them up as black boxes in order to observe how the bigger box behaves with them.
This means that my comment can extend as long as I want and I can write entire books on the constructs of this scenario, but we need to stop it somewhere. This is why I have taken that so called "leap of faith". I am open to the possibility that I am wrong, and I hope that I am wrong, but that doesn't make the problem any less pressing.