India does not need to learn from West?

An headline article in "Economic Times" caught my attention today. "Are Gates and Buffet" buffed by India Inc?

At the end of the complete read, I felt poor about India Inc and my deep bias towards Indian family culture grew manifold. The summary of the article was. Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, the billionaires from west, on their tour to India found only a couple of handful Indian billionaires attending their philanthropy promotion dinner. The article went on to explain in details about how Indian businessmen are different than western. A summary is here.

Left side is the comment from Article - Right side is my reaction.

1. India has a rich culture - (What is the definition of rich? Handful of Brahmins ruling the knowledge world, handful of kings ruling poor people to support their luxurious lifestyle? And tons of nonsense religious superstitions and spiritual richness, which are not really helping anybody to make any progress to the extent half the country's poor go to sleep without food?).

2. India has a strong family culture - (Yes, where Ambani brothers fight in public for left overs by their father).

3. Indian family businesses need to live for their heirs and can not spare for others - (Yes, else those poor heirs who grew up traveling Mercedes, would not have a baseline to make their future travels in Jet Liners).

4. India believes in family culture and not independence - (Yes, family culture, where only your family matters, outside your family, your home, there is deep nonsense as a society, as long as you are doing good as family, screw the society. Why build independent kids who can think on their own, because else how could families be not able to manipulate them?).

5. India inc has its own ways of giving - (Yes, that is why you see such a pathetic education system, such pathetic infrastructure and such pathetic society).

At the end the article said, India does not need to learn from West. I am like what? God save this country. If this country and its businessmen rule on the attitude of "we do not need to learn from others"...I can imagine its future ....Well ofcourse these are the views of the article author, but a super respected business paper, like Economic Times, providing such conclusions on its headline article, leaves lot to worry about the overall attitude of Indian society.


But on a cheering note, there was also an article in Economic Times that Indians are the fourth largest donors to Wikipedia worldwide with an average donation of around $17. Well I lost the statistics completely, but this is more cheerful a news.

Only if our industrialists understand their role in building societies. I have the highest respect for Tata's, Premaji, Narayan Murthy, Birla's. The view in this article, does not include them.