Comment by kamaal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kamaal | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

>>You're 100% correct. However, the poor in India are truly trapped, almost like slaves to their own poverty

Sorry I refuse to believe in this victim hood mentality. We seriously need to get out of this 'Somebody needs to do it for me' ideology. Nobody is going to help you and shouldn't. Because frankly no matter whom you can speak to is going through a little battle of their own.

I am working hard here pushing 19 hour schedules to ensure I have a good life. Somebody else is all welcome to do so. I can understand if the person is ill or is physically disabled. But a healthy person who doesn't work hard deserves his condition.

And in a country like India, expecting somebody to come and help is not a unrealistic expectation but a 'unjust' expectation.

>>By comparison those who have acquired sufficient wealth are free to do whatever they please!

You make acquiring wealth sound like somebody just woke up one day and found a sack of gold biscuits at their door step.

>>With that freedom comes a responsibility to acknowledge it and to not act like complete idiots

Exactly.

There by each man for his own and shall deserve net result of his own work.

>>Unfortunately, even the rich to a large extent aren't aware of how rich they truly are.

Because nothing is really enough but that's a totally different discussion altogether.

>Sorry I refuse to believe in this victim hood mentality. We seriously need to get out of this 'Somebody needs to do it for me' ideology. Nobody is going to help you and shouldn't. Because frankly no matter whom you can speak to is going through a little battle of their own.

> I am working hard here pushing 19 hour schedules to ensure I have a good life. Somebody else is all welcome to do so. I can understand if the person is ill or is physically disabled. But a healthy person who doesn't work hard deserves his condition.

> And in a country like India, expecting somebody to come and help is not a unrealistic expectation but a 'unjust' expectation.

I think you misunderstood what he's talking about. India isn't the United States.

Until recently India had a rigid caste system where it was simply impossible for people to move outside of their caste. If a person's parents were laborers, they became laborers - that was their caste. It had nothing to do with how hard they worked or if other people helped them. Their caste was "laborer," so that's the only job they'd be able to get.

It's not as strict as it used to be, and it's slowly dying out, but it does still exist.

I am an Indian and I have never been to any other country so far. But I wrote stands true for India.

Caste system is a option, you can either associate yourself to it or leave it. This is true at least in modern day India and has been the the case for nearly 20 years now. You can easily ditch your caste, just like atheists ditch their religion.

The fact is caste system offers a comfortable cushion of victim hood and gives you enough reasons to justify failure or even not trying.

These days belonging to a lower caste is a gift because you get reservations nearly every where. There are protests by many communities to include them in back ward communities because of the reservations. People are fighting to be backward, Read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Gurjar_unrest_in_Rajasthan

The situation is such that people want to belong to backward communities and castes.

True freedom is dangerous, many people know it, and they don't even want it.

Kamaal, this is not true. Your name (often an indicator of caste) alone influences how likely you are to be hired. And not everyone knows that.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/40276548

Perhaps true in some metros but even as of 5-6 years ago I know of caste based discrimination in villages. People weren't allowed to drink from the village well because of caste and I recall something on the lines of not being allowed to let their shadows touch others.

In the US slavery was outlawed over 200 years ago and we still suffer with the socioeconomic consequences of it to this day, and for many days to come. To say the caste system was done away with 20 years ago and think it doesn't have a strong influence today I think is folly. I say that having no experience with India but knowing precedence strongly implies this to be the case.

In the USA, slavery was outlawed in 1865, with the end of the US civil war.

whoops, definitely my mistake on exact time frame there (early vs mid-late 1800's), but we'll just say 150 years ago then.

One should travel, Kamaal. Perspectives change with travel (Even within India, but not the temple hopping travel). You will understand so much more of the world from travel than from being in front of the screen for 19 hours every day. Life does not begin after you retire.

Caste system is not just reservations/backward communities. It includes the different sub-castes (Ex - Different sub-castes in the Brahmin caste). This is very relevant in vote bank politics. A candidate belonging to sub-caste X will not get elected if the region has majority people from sub-caste Y, even if the candidate is known to be capable.

The main reason for the terrible infrastructure conditions in India is politics and corruption. These are strongly rooted in the caste/sub-caste system. Money has always been flowing freely in politics and it is what makes politics attractive.

The terrible infrastructure I refer to is basic - water, electricity, medicines. Malls, fancy cars cannot substitute water. In India, People are dying for water these days. This will only increase exponentially. There has been research showing that 24 hour water supply is possible with the current fresh water resources in India, but it won't happen, thanks to politics, corruption and the caste system.

The SUV situation brought up in the article is not caste based. It was money based and money is the new, bonus caste system on top of existing ones.

There are people (more often than not children) in the world that work 20 hours a day in small crowded rooms and make less than living wage.

They don't really know another way of life. That is all they have ever been exposed to. They don't know about Apple/Google/iPhone or Steve Jobs or what a computer is because their village is so fucking remote that the Government of India decided it would be a hassle to provide electricity, and their parents decided to make additional income by renting out a few kids to make ends meet.

These people don't really consider themselves victims, because they don't think they have been wronged. They were mostly unlucky in the lottery of life and born in poor circumstances.

You can refuse to believe whatever you want but the fact is that you were extremely lucky in life to be either born in a relatively well to do family or in circumstances that exposed you technology, educational experiences over the course of your life. Having an internet connection can be a life changing effect, because of the access to information it provides.

>> Nobody is going to help you and shouldn't.

>> But a healthy person who doesn't work hard deserves his condition.

>> expecting somebody to come and help is not a unrealistic expectation but a 'unjust' expectation.

>> There by each man for his own and shall deserve net result of his own work.

^^ I am glad that everyone doesn't think like you because the world truly would be an awful place if they did.

>>They were mostly unlucky in the lottery of life and born in poor circumstances.

I never denied that. My whole point was, now that you are- What next?

If you think you are happy with poverty then the story ends there. If you aren't then, the government can do little, Sorry but there are simply too many people in our country. The ordinary citizen will not and can't do anything about you.

It will be your and your problem alone.

It will be difficult, hard and a tiring lifelong worth of work. Just like it is for everybody else.

What else were you thinking?

Your callousness and (what seems to be a) lack of empathy to those less fortunate is quite confronting to read.

Kamaal makes a valid point. He is simply stating things from the perspective of a poor person, and is describing reality. It would be a big mistake for a poor person to rely on somebody else to improve his situation.

The situation is very similar in South Africa. The poor makes up such a large proportion of the population that their situation cannot be improved significantly without major wealth redistribution (combined with a massive reduction in government corruption, preferably). Neither of these things are likely to happen (unless there is a revolution), so a poor person can only realisticly rely on himself to improve his situation.

Kamaal's point does not contradict the OP's. It's just a statement of reality from the perspective of the poor.

I wouldn't agree with this. the poor (generally) on their own: Have no chance. They can work endlessly, and their situation will not change. Kamaal seems to be blaming them for being 'victims'... But they literally have no chance on their own. They need others (poor and higher classes) to change the institutions that cause their helplessness.

Arguing they have only themselves to rely on, feels like a rationalisation to not help them.

Which part of Kamaal's post blames anybody for having the 'victim mentality'? All I see him saying is that 10:1 nobody will help you so you need to either accept poverty or work towards getting yourself out of it.

EDIT: I see where you're coming from now that I've seen his higher-up posts.

Half of the problem of being poor is even being aware that you are able to change your status. It's intellectually lazy to pull the 'just work hard' line, when most of what gets you wealth is what you know, not how hard you work.

Not to mention that in the end, even if everyone did 'just work hard', there isn't enough wealth to go around. The civilised thing is at least to give people basic services and let themselves work to higher wealth from there.

I never said "just working hard" will solve the poor's problems. All I said was that it's better to do all you can than to expect help to come from the government or charity because that is unrealistic in countries with such a large poor population and would most likely only get you a lifetime of false hope.

And I am not saying that most poor people expect handouts. If anything I would guess that most of them are hard-working. I only brought it up because of the parent post. I realise I owe my own middle-class status to the fact that my parents are middle-class.

And I am all for the well-off helping the poor. I only wish the (South African, in my case) government would do their part.

No, but your parent did. My point is that merely knowing that you can work to improve your position, build on it, is novel information in and of itself for a great many people, not to mention how to do that.

My position is less about handouts, and more about the assumption that poor people know how to get out of poverty and all that's missing is the elbow grease. Yes, relying on the government for handouts isn't going to work, and you also want to be careful of welfare dependence. But education is a significant wealth-enabler, and merely knowing how to deal with various things can give people a leg up. Kamaal's point is about giving a giant shrug and saying "eh, what can you do?". It reflects the current realities of the situation, but the lazy part is not bothering to think of better ways forward.

> there isn't enough wealth to go around.

Though one often reads that acquiring/making wealth isn't a zero sum game.

It definitely isn't a zero-sum game - more basic medical skills in a demographic will improve quality of life, for example, and that's just (almost) free knowledge - but it still doesn't mean there's enough wealth to give everyone a comfortable life.

> Neither of these things are likely to happen (unless there is a revolution),

There was actually a revolution. When I was a kid, Nelson Mandela was in jail. Did the revolution improve matters?

One thing is very different between .in and .za: .za is one of the most violent countries in the world, while .in is one of the least violent.

(a) working 19 hours a day will ensure you do not have a good life.

(b) to recognize the caste system, you have to go somewhere it doesn't exist. Right now you know as much about it as a typical fish knows about water.

(c) we're human beings, and none of us gets ahead alone; we all have people to help us. We can't even survive infancy without help from other people. The people a kilometer from you who have expensive SUVs without having to work 19-hour days? That's mostly because they got a lot of help from other people, such as their parents, and only partly because they worked hard — in some cases, not at all. Working hard is really, really important, but far from enough.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com