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Comment by SanjayMehta | Hacker News Reader

Yes and no.

The real cause of our dysfunctional system is the debris of nehruvian socialism (he was a covert communist masking himself as a Fabian socialist).

He didn't reform the British divide and control mechanisms but continued them and in fact made them worse. If you think your bureaucracy is bad, wait till you see ours.

These are "one exam wonders." They clear one exam, and with zero life experience at the age of 25 can sabotage almost any enterprise with their clerical behaviour.

Our own deep state.

It's much better in the private sector but this mindset is pervasive.

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The one great commonality I've noticed about California Democrats and Online Indians is that each region's problems seem exclusively the fault of some long dead fellow.

Apparently this Nehru chap has been dead for 60 years. In fact, India has only been a country for 80 years so he's been dead for most of the time India has been around.

Likewise with Ronald Reagan. Supposedly he's responsible for all the woes of California since.

I've got to be honest. It's not that convincing.

It reminds me of those engineers who you hire and one month in they don't have anything to show because of "tech debt" and shit like that. It's always the fault of some guy who has long left. Then you hire other engineers and they just nail it. Such is life. There's blamers and doers and the two are not usually the same.

Believe whatever you wish. We live with this reality. At least you can move from CA to TX. We can't, it's the same clown show everywhere.

The fact is that for every policy the government introduces, the entrenched clerks find ways to sabotage it.

If you think you can handle it I invite you to come and apply for any government scheme of your choice.

True story: we once sent an NDA to a government ministry for review and it came back with one objection after 11 months. The objection was that the year was wrong in the document.

After that we no longer bid for any government work.

Oh I have no doubt it's miserable, and your story is pretty funny haha. I just don't think that a guy who has been dead for 75% of a country's existence is why something is a certain way. It's been 60 years without the fellow. It's not like he's an immortal god commanding you still.

It's the entrenched system built by that long dead British stooge.

They just have to outlast each elected government of five years and they have a similar judiciary which protects them.

There was a (feeble) attempt by the current government in their previous term to reform the judiciary (NJAC Act) and the entrenched judges ruled it unconstitutional. Unlike the US, judges aren't political appointees, they appoint each other.

This is the same as the 'tech debt' argument, if I'm being honest. It's always too hard to change some crucial function of the entire code, everything depends on it, yadda yadda. Here in America, that was what people said about the majority of policy and then Trump comes to power and just writes executive orders that change how the country is run. It's a problem that his orders have bad effects, but you can't deny the fact that he has agency.

Unlike all those engineers who will say there's too much 'tech debt'. Everything is always "entrenched" and 'too hard to change' and shit like that. Then someone who is both interested in changing things and has sufficient will to change things shows up and it turns out it wasn't that hard after all. Seen it in eng orgs numerous times.

It wouldn't be surprising that India has no one like that. These people are rare. The US got one and it turns out you also need competence or the changes will just be totally bogus.

I don't know if this source is biased [0], but Nehru sounds refreshingly pragmatic and does not come across as a burden to India and his "socialism" is different from the standard US boogieman socialism or Soviet socialism that you could hardly argue that India was ever on the path towards communism. At some point it's just a kneejerk reaction to the word "socialism".

[0] https://www.thehindu.com/society/nehrus-socialism-was-evolut...

The Hindu is a biased source.

They were once caught red handed cropping images of documents to push their narrative.

https://www.opindia.com/2019/02/the-hindu-not-only-cropped-t...

>>The real cause of our dysfunctional system is the debris of nehruvian socialism (he was a covert communist masking himself as a Fabian socialist).

It has been 50 years since his time. And most of what he did now has largely faded out to nothingness. OTOH, his time wasn't all that bad either. Even till 2000s cities in South India were very liveable, with decent quality of life.

Most of Indias problem come from a brutal zero sum game society, where population is too large, and there isn't enough affluence going around.

Everyone, every community and sub group, down the individual has to do anything in takes to snatch, hoard and then deny as many resources they can. Even if it means wrecking everything that exists to get there.

Nothing good comes out of these things.

To begin with fixing India, you must work towards having affluence of a few decades atleast. A generation or two need to live through this to wash away behaviours of a scarcity game.

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