Cultures that keep looking at imagined past glories, imo, are destined to become static and falter.
If education was just chanting this half the day the world would be better off.
I had a Hindu nationalist recently berate me about how the "US had lost the Space Race, ISRO was the clear winner."
I mentioned the US landed on the Moon first, and he said "would rather have not landed on the Moon than live in a country with a large number of Black people" (put less pleasantly).
Weird guy! Weird political movement!
... did they give any examples of ISRO space accomplishments that predate US or Soviet accomplishment?
Many of them think India is going to be the next superpower and economic miracle out there. There's a large number of them working in big tech, and they'll say how fantastic India is, now that there are very high-paying tech jobs available there (almost all of them in American companies) and this gives them fantastic standards of living because they can easily afford maids and cooks aka cheap labor they can exploit. I scratch my head and wonder, if India is so good WTF are they still doing here, while also working on their Green Card petitions?
Is this in India or abroad?
Oh, and the same maid works in 4 different houses, getting a reasonable monthly income.
But then the same Hindu nationalists had this weird tendency to think they were entitled to US based tech jobs. They would claim Indians were responsible for all the tech companies in the US being successful and not Americans and that America is this awful, sad, corrupt society that they really wanted to get into despite India being better in every way apparently. It was irritating at times and sad because this isn't uncommon imo.
The second point is that a lot of the problems in India do stem from colonialism - in Asian culture the vast majority don't usually segregate Europe from the US, and view Americans as being just as responsible for colonialism and the benefits of colonialism as modern-day Europeans.
Some of Erdoğan's most reliable voters live in Germany. It's not uncommon.
There is plenty of objective material to feed discourses about admirable achievements that Indian people offered to mankind. I mean, think Pāṇini or Ramanujan to cite only two people whose work are well known in HN community. But obviously they are numerous example in many western scholar fields and beyond like yoga or Kamasutra.
It makes all the more ridiculous any attempt to exaggerate about glorious past: those who do prove themselves not living up the depth and fine grained nuances of their actual heritage.
An indo-european language no less.
It's beyond pathetic.
or was it Telugu. I forget lol.
This last guy claimed that those languages also derived from it.
And he didn't like "those people" either.
There might have been aliens into the mix as well.
Everyone looks at the glory of yesterday, but some are much more obsessed with it. It becomes issue when it leads to contradicting the facts, using it to harm others, and preventing yourself from building a better future.
And even besides it, the US is highly backwards-looking. At its best, it's political culture is ossified and enslaved to the predominant opinions of a small group of people who are two centuries dead. (While being oblivious to the fact that within that group, there was a huge spectrum of disagreement on these fundamental questions!)
Pile on a bunch of American Exceptionalism, and you get a perfect thought-terminating cocktail of 'It is this way because it's always been this way and because we are the greatest country in the world.'
These are the cultures that do this most. Pointing to a mythologized and stolen past greatness is a coping mechanism for the insecurities of a flagging present.
That every country has its share of people who engage in such backward-looking, glorifying-the-past behavior does not make it right.
India’s obsession with the past has coincided with a period of anaemic real growth and widespread joblessness and unemployment.