A critical look at Indian Value system

This article is HIGHLY borrowed from a speech of NRN. My role here is only 'information/knowledge' dissemination. 

I am ready to be born a thousand times over if only, said a chauvinistically patriotic friend of mine, beating his chest, if only I am born an Indian every time. If not to that extent, I am sure all of us are proud Indians. Of course we should be. David Abraham in his The Rough Guide to India says “It is impossible not to be astonished by India. Nowhere else on Earth does humanity present itself in such a creative burst of cultures and religions, races and tongues.”  We all have umpteen reasons why we are proud to be an Indian. It could be our rich culture, history, variety and Indian Value system or Indian philosophy.

We all know how rich and unique is Indian value system and how it makes us different. But today let us take a critical look at our Value system.

What is a value system? It is the protocol for behavior that enhances the trust, confidence and commitment of the members of a community. It goes beyond the domain of legality. It translates to putting the community’s interest ahead of your own. Even Vedas say ‘Man can live individually but can survive collectively.’

Two pillars of the value system are loyalty to the family and loyalty to the community. One should not be in isolation of the other and successful societies are those which combine both harmoniously. However, Indian society has, for over a thousand years put loyalty to the family ahead of loyalty to society. We can see thousand examples of behavioral manifestations of this nature. Let us consider a few.

We Indians have tremendous loyalty to the family. Parents make sacrifices for children. At the same time children consider it their duty to take care of aged parents. We believe in ‘matru devo bhava’, ‘pitru devo bhava’. We believe in making sacrifices for our siblings. Marriage is regarded to be a sacred union. And the examples go on. And of course I am proud to be part of such a culture.

Unfortunately, our attitude towards family is not reflected in our attitude towards community. We do not think twice before littering streets and parks, though we are very fastidious in our house. Bribing is considered an art and has become a part of ‘jugaad’.  We are apathetic to community good.  We have very bad traffic sense. This list too goes on.

Apathy in addressing community matters is also very abundant. We see serious problem around us behave as if the problems do not exist or as if they belong to someone else. What could be the reason for our apathy? We were ruled by foreigners for over a thousand years. So, we have always believed that public or societal issues belong to some foreign ruler and that we have no responsibility to solve them. ‘We are what we repeatedly do’ said Aristotle. Having waited for some foreigner tell us what to do, over thousand  years, our decision makers still look to somebody else  to make their decision when there is nobody to look up to.

Intellectual arrogance is also very evident in us. We boast so much about our past though our current accomplishment is less. This does not seem to be a new phenomenon anyway.  In ‘Alberuni’s India, where the author Alberuni, a middle Eastern Traveller in India in 8^th century makes an interesting remark. He says, during his visit, most Indian pundits considered it below their dignity to even hold arguments with him. And on a few occasions when he did get a chance to discuss and made a lot of sound arguments, they asked him which Indian pundit had taught him these smart things!

One other issue is of punctuality. Our Indian Standard time seems to be always running late. Here we take coming late to meeting or gathering is a sign of importance. The higher you are in the hierarchy, the later you are supposed to come to any meeting.

We become intimate even without being friendly.  It won’t take more than 5 minutes of conversation with a new acquaintance before we are ready to ask favors from them. Rudyard Kipling once said, ‘A westerner can be friendly without being intimate while an easterner tends to be intimate without being friendly’.  

So what do we have to do now? We should first remind ourselves that arrogance breeds hypocrisy. ‘It is easy to dodge our responsibilities but we cannot dodge the consequences of dodging our responsibilities’. If we have to make progress, we have to change our attitude, learn from people who have performed better than us and perform better than them. With regards this we have a lot to learn from so called ‘the West’.  Some of the things we have learn and improve upon are accountability of our actions, professionalism, punctuality and putting society’s interest at least at the same level as self-interest.  We have to remember that most of our fundamental problems grow out of lack of commitment to the common good. Culture is that which helps us to work for the betterment of all.

I whole heartedly do believe that we are citizens of a great country. But as Winston Churchill said, ‘Responsibility is the price of greatness.’ Let us make our country a great place to live. Let us work towards maximum welfare of maximum people.

‘Samasta jananam sukhino bhavantu’