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I think there is clear distinction between being literate and being smart. Many politicians that you noted or otherwise, have used their smartness and political acumen, to achieve what they wanted. Their smartness mostly reflects in the form of misleading voices, captivating their electorate's emotions. Dishonest, but smart. I think an achievement in STEM is not the only proof of smartness.

As far as Kitabi Kida goes - to my understanding, it is used for those who spent inordinate amount of time with books - not necessarily a insult for being smart. I think there's a subtle distinction here too.

I think that there can be an "inordinate amount of time" you can spend reading is the anti-intellectualism here.

Someone could be obsessed with books to the point where it's harming other aspects of their life. Although I'm sure the insult is often used as genuine anti-intellectualism, I also understand why a society would not be impressed by someone who spends 15 hours a day reading Captain Underpants books.

It’s also a direct translation of the words book and worm. Which indicates it’s not an indigenous phrase.

>>In India for example - people do get called "Kitabi Kida"(bookworm)

We also have a saying: पढोगे लिखोगे बनोगे नवाब, खेलोगे कूदोगे बनोगे ख़राब

Which literally translates to education makes you a king, and playing makes you spoilt.

The generic किताबी कीड़ा insult is largely for nerds with awkward interests and lifestyles.

>>I forget but there is a insult for people who have gained knowledge from reading books but aren't street smart.

Mostly in our culture we try to accumulate a lot at little effort, so cheating is a valuable skill.

>>India elected Narendra Modi who is decidedly nowhere as educated as previous prime minister. The state I am from(Bihar) had series of Chief Ministers who weren't all the educated(or even intelligent as a matter of fact).

For the most of India's political history leaders were about representing people and segments of society backward compared to already well of folks. So what matters really is what policy outlook you have.

But you still have Jawaharlal Nehru who was the prime minister for 17 years, Manmohan Singh was for 10 years. Rajiv Gandhi and Indira Gandhi were both well read and groomed individuals. And you could say Indira was a far better Prime minister than we've had since Nehru.

You have like a good 40 years of well read people running the country.

>>I think people select their politicians differently than how they would select their Doctor or mechanic to repair their car or engine.

No, its the same. If a person is a deep bigot, violence monger from within, he choses leaders who are best at that. Its just that intention doesn't show on people's faces. And whatever they may say outside, they vote with their hearts at the voting booth.

>>The point is - smart people are not always likable and in a politician likability and ability to relate yourself to him/her(even if faked) are desired qualities.

The Doctor analogy describes this better. You chose a good doctor to treat your heart. You don't go to a bad one whole smiles and cracks jokes.

> The generic किताबी कीड़ा insult is largely for nerds with awkward interests and lifestyles.

No, it's a literal translation of "book worm". I've never seen it used for people who just have quirky interests and don't otherwise read or study a lot.

> India elected Narendra Modi who is decidedly nowhere as educated as previous prime minister.

Yet he promotes technology (Startup India, Paperless/Digital Locker, Digital ID, Live tracking of projects online, EVMs, Soil testing labs, Solar) much more than one of the IIT educated Chief Minister. The point is that a good leader does not need fancy degrees from fancy colleges.

The IIT guy is only saying if you don't fix education and healthcare, you won't have people who can do basic knowledge work, let alone write operating systems and do other big research work.

That was the whole idea behind Nehruvian socialism. The problem in essence is in a country with poverty levels comparable to Africa, absent education systems, near zero literacy levels. How do you run a capitalist economy? The best you can manage with that kind of human resources is give them dumbest possible manufacturing jobs, by letting foreign investors control what is a newly independent country. Hence around 1947, the then PM Jawaharlal Nehru, came up education institutions the likes of IITs, IIScs and other regional colleges. Once you have these people first rung of talented human resources ready, you can now use them to build your private industries. But you can't wait till then, so you still have to build your bureaucracy with pretty darn high civil services exam standards. This is important because while you are building your people, you need to build some government owned industries. This will eventually feed momentum to later to come private industries.

The net result is you get public sector industries, you get ISRO, you get DRDO, you get a stable bureaucracy. All of this will essentially run your country.

The next set of work to do is to fix primary education. So that even the bottom most layers of the society can get a shot at doing good things in life.

You also need healthcare. Because if 20% of your population is limping with polio or can't breath properly because of TB then you can't be a decent economy anyway.

For all that is told about things like Bay Area. The edge California has is not US-101-N or the Caltrain, Its the people.

The IIT guy is the first guy in decades who is taking sense, instead of trying to sell building websites(which any idiot can build) as progress.

Fix your people, then your people fix everything.

Well, it's an editorial in the Japan Times by a guy who only talks about America...and Europe.

Ted Rall, ladies and gentlemen.

Ahh... that explains the poor quality of the writing in the article.

Ted Rall is perhaps the least interesting, least insightful, and least amusing living political cartoonist. He fills a certain political niche though, which I guess pays the bills.

> I am not sure how much of this is true.

Not much of it is true. It's a very old derogatory attack, that goes back to the foundations of the US and the earlier colonies. The 'cultured' Western European elites mocked the region back then as uncivilized, filled with barbarians and simpletons, and so on. This was of course a time when people like Adams, Madison, Jefferson, Paine and Benjamin Franklin were actually arguing and then implementing enlightenment policies in political fact, while nearly all of Europe would proceed to be ruled by despots for another 100-200 years. To say nothing of the flight of people from Europe to American shores over the coming century plus, desperate to escape extreme poverty in Western Europe. And yet the snobbish attacks continued just the same.

Take for example the song, Yankee Doodle, one of the more amusing cases of this in action -

"Traditions place its origin in a pre-Revolutionary War song originally sung by British military officers to mock the disheveled, disorganized colonial "Yankees" with whom they served in the French and Indian War" ... "The British troops sang it to make fun of their stereotype of the American soldier as a Yankee simpleton who thought that he was stylish if he simply stuck a feather in his cap."

"It was also popular among the Americans as a song of defiance."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yankee_Doodle

The other word you forgot was 'maggu' - someone who mugs up everything.

But these words are targeted at people who are not actually smart, but work hard to cover it up. In the west though, people who are actually smart get the hate. In fact, if you are in the top 0.5% or so, you could consider yourself lucky when you end up JUST ostracized. (Elon Musk famously got bullied so severely he had to get his nose fixed so he could breathe well)

There is this mysterious condition first described by Hans Asperger around the WWII, that the chinese fail to recognize and western scientists gave up understanding, until it was finally reclassified as a form of autism, as by every cognitive test they could think of, the people score normal, or (often highly) above average, yet they completely fail at interacting with other people. That is, until somebody realized they are too smart and nobody wants to interact with them: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4927579/

This is a necessary consequence of individualism, as being smart in an individualist culture means you are a dangerous competition to basically everybody else, and everybody will do everything they can to make you fail. So it's pretty much certain that an individualist culture will eventually result in "idiocracy" by breeding itself stupid.

These insults seem to be targeted at unintelligent people who try to brute force their way to success.

That's "insults for hard work" perhaps, but not "insults for smart people".

It's more like "insults for lying about your abilities" not for hard work.

That's a specific insult, for people who get good marks via rote learning and not via actually understanding the material.

Being well-eduxated doesn't make for a good leader; Rahul Gandhi has a better educational pedigree than Narendra Modi, but in no world is he a better leader.

I take the tag of 'kitabi kida' as a complement rather than an insult .