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Comment by hacjjjjjjjj | Hacker News Reader

India had thousands of such temples for example, Somanatha etc. from which Arabs, Mughals and the crazy British took from it. When British came to India, india was the richest country and when they left India, India was the poorest country. Whites people have bad culture.

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I'm an Indian and a hindu. I've been to that temple. It's really sad to think that there would thousands of people around that temple who would go hungry as we speak and this temple has wealth that will pretty much stay locked up for the rest of humanity. It'll never get invested. No next google would come from thiruvanandapuram because of this. People would go on their lives living in terrible houses, driving terrible vehicles on atrocious roads. And Hindu fanatics would organize protests at the first mention of using this for any practical purpose.

Considering local government corruption, I'd actually be happy if it wasn't used for 'practical' purposes if the government gets to control all this wealth.

I doubt it is the lack of money which is the primary cause of the state of our society. No amount of money can bring out a society from the corruption & mismanagement. By all means, let us use part of the treasure for public good (I say part since I assume the historical/antique value for majority of it). But unless we manage to fix our system, we will be back to broken roads and shabby houses very soon.

It's about feeding a man vs. teaching him to find his food. All the collected wealth will vanish if we use it to feed people. People/Communities/Governments have to learn to build wealth and not live off it. Some part of this can go into making the land a better place but I think the most important use of it is to make the people proud and want to live better and build more wealth (hence standard of living). A large part of this treasure should be proudly displayed in a fantastic Museum.

Putting aside your extremely dubious claim that India was the richest country before the arrival of the British, I still fail to see why you think "White culture" is so terrible. Want to know how a small country like England managed to subjugate a huge country like India? Instead of stealing riches from it's people, to store it in a temple, leaving the people to live on uneducated poverty, the English instead were investing in infrastructure - roads, railway, schools, courts, police. The thing is, all of those investments made England a better place to live for in, if you were just an average person. What did India do during that time? When you figure out the answer to that question, come back and tell us how Indias culture was so superior to "White" culture.

Both the comments are equally naive I believe. There is no way you can logically justify English colonialism was on the whole a beneficial experience for India and you'd have to come up with a much better explanation to justify that. You need to look only as far as the middle ages to see new religions being created and Indian trade / influence extending all over south-east asia. (Seriously, even now, I walk into a Thai restaurant today and I'm amazed how similar the deities are)

While I totally disagree with the term "superior" culture (honestly, Beethoven, Bach, Da Vinci, Roman empire? No way.), I'd also urge you to look up India's art, music and general lifestyle before the British invasion, and it's not as if we were tribals living off of hunting and gathering either.

And as to your second comment about "stealing riches from its people", it's called taxing, and every kingdom levies taxes and stores them _somewhere_. In this case it happened to be a temple. If anything, it speaks to the prosperity of a kingdom that they could afford to even spend so much on art.

You haven't understood my post at all. 1) I do not think that the British colonising India was a good thing. Indeed I even went to the trouble of using the negative word 'subjugate', instead of the neutral word 'colonise' to get the point across. 2) I certainly don't think it was a good thing for India, and I never said anything at all to suggest that I did think it was a good thing. 3) I don't have a problem with taxes. I have a problem with rich people taxing poor people and then hoarding the money. My entire post was about this. I didn't criticise the British for taxing their people, because those taxes were then re-invested to the benefit of the people. India chose not to do that, and I would argue that this is the sine qua non of a weak culture.

What's it got to do with people being white? Long before the existence of the east India company Pusyamitra Sunga did more than his bit to undo all that Ashoka did to create a united India. While the British did not rule India for the sake of Indians, haven't individuals like Sir Arthur Thomas Cotton helped in creating a modern/self-reliant and Scientific India? Indians Blaming the mughals/Brit rulers is like blaming Google for indexing your mysqldump backup (with plain text passwords) after storing it in public_html/

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