I think the author touched on this lightly, but I feel like there is a little more to be said about “signaling” or what I like to personally call, “resume flexing”.<p>In India, all people at all times are building their resumes for a semi-vague goal usually wealth or a happy retirement. This idea is embedded quite early on in age as the article author suggested - you’re usually pointed at a career in middle school that makes it easier to achieve above said goal.<p>The flywheel then spins ever faster as every decision you make thereafter is about getting closer and closer to this vague goal of “success/wealth/societal perception”. You pick universities based on rankings, large tech companies over startups, management over individual contributor work and of course America over everything else.<p>This problem isn’t isolated to India by any means, and like all stereotypes isn’t applicable to all people from India but in a country of 1B+ people, it’s just dialed up to 11. Hacktoberfest and GSOC are just unfortunate victims to this resume building. The fastest way to put these on your resume and flex it, is to create a spam commit and shortcut your way to a tshirt or certificate.
I am Indian-American, and while I cannot comment much about the culture of Indians in India, I can comment a bit about the culture of Indian-Americans, especially second-gen Indian Americans like myself. Many of my Indian-American classmates exhibit the behaviors described in this article. For example, in my high school (a magnet program for gifted students), there were several Indian-American students, many of whom were "high-achieving". Most of them put a lot of effort into trying to buff their resumes to get into good colleges, for example by volunteering on causes they didn't really care about. Cheating was rampant; the attitude many students seemed to have was why actually learn stuff when you can just cheat and get the same career rewards? Almost all of them followed very conventional (read: boring) career paths; in fact most of them became doctors. True creativity and risk-taking was not a personality trait I commonly observed, I'm sorry to say. I was lucky to have very "Americanized" parents who didn't raise me with these backward attitudes.
It’s interesting comparing this to Australia / NZs cultural career issue, “tall poppy syndrome” [1].<p>People really need to be coached to even say a personal achievement let alone sell it when apply for jobs.<p>1. <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome</a>
> <i>Somehow Indian parents will become self sufficient, so that children are free to do and discover what they actually want.</i><p>This bit near the bottom (under "improbable futures") really struck me as necessary, and not just an Indian problem. The pressure to be generally successful and support their immediate family is hard enough on anyone, but adding onto that the pressure to be able to care for your parents when they're old is even worse.<p>I'm not saying people shouldn't care for their parents, or that people shouldn't live in multi-generational households, but humanity really needs to figure out how to care for our older members without requiring huge sacrifices from their children. Some countries have mostly figured this out with strong social safety nets, but many... have not. And beyond that, we shouldn't have to rely on a social safety net. Increasing income inequality makes it harder and harder for people to build enough wealth during their lives so they can retire comfortable, or even at all.
I’ll duplicate a comment I made on another thread today.<p>This has less to do with India, and more about what happens when there’s no prior <i>culture of open source</i>, to balance against the willingness to “hustle”. The fact that a lot of these PRs might originate in India is only relevant insofar as there are a lot of people willing to hustle, and don’t have much open source experience to understand the culture and the role played by maintainers. Chances are that they are oblivious to what happens on the other side of the table, and open source projects are abstract entities (which might as well be run by Github, or some other bureaucracy!) A useful reminder that the celebrated “hustle” is susceptible to the unintended consequences of Goodhart’s law.<p>If this was Sean Parker with Napster or Zuck with early Facebook, we’d be celebrating their initiative.<p>For all those who advocate for growth hacking techniques, or annoying ads, this is exactly how scummy most such techniques / dark patterns feel to users. I don’t think that is geographically localized in any way.<p>As for comments trying to characterize “Indian culture”, it’s <i>really complicated</i>! With a population of ~1.4B people, you’ll easily get a LOT of examples for <i>any</i> kind of behavior (including stark polar opposites, sometimes competed to optimality). The same people writing such articles will often also turn around and write articles about the lack of entrepreneurial hustle in India and the need for more jugaad :smh:
A lot of places have societies where culturally the game is about getting ahead of others. You're all together in a society competing for the top spots.<p>Whereas certain other cultures are more about working together to create an ideal environment for all to be emancipated and enjoy life to its fullest.<p>Personally, I prefer the latter, as it just seems much more enjoyable and fun to live in such a culture. The former culture is stressful and doesn't really seem to bring as much value out of my life, it feels a lot more artificial in its end goal. Instead of appreciating the time on a planet full of wonders, you spend the time feeling good knowing you beat others and ended on top. I honestly couldn't really find salvation in that goal, on my last day breathing, I'd feel like the king of fools, a fool none the less, and like I just missed out on a life that could have been so much more. But off course that must just show my cultural bias. And I wonder if happiness is cultural, while I would be happier in the latter culture, someone born in the former might be happier in that one. Just something for me to keep pondering about
> The prevalence of extreme signalling brews the classic and infamous herd mentality in our minds. In middle school children have dreams to become a Pilot in the airforce, or maybe a Police officer, or maybe a Opera Singer ! But by the time of high school, everyone is just either on road to become an Engineer, a Doctor, a Lawyer, a Chartered Accountant …. or a failure. This may seem harsh but that’s how most of the society operates here in India.<p>Sounds remarkably similar to how I was raised here in the US.
IMHO calling it "Hacktoberfest" and <i>not</i> expecting a Jugaad flood seems rather naive of DO.<p>That said, a very similar culture exists in China and the Asian subcontinent (with the exception of Japan and possibly the Koreas), in particular SE Asia, so I wouldn't say it's specific to India.
There is a story about this mocking Indian culture. One day the captain of the ship was transporting containers filled with crabs. When he discovered it was crabs he got upset and said to his fellow sailors to make sure there is lids on those containers so that they do not get out. To that one sailor said “Dont worry captain. These are Indian crabs. If one gets up another will pull him down.” I remember thinking of this story and feel we are like crabs in India and some of it has to do with huge population and limited resources. If we had a limited population and plenty of resources we would not be doing Jugad.
Indians among most corrupt while doing business abroad <a href="https://archive.is/ppsJF" rel="nofollow">https://archive.is/ppsJF</a>
I agree with some points but most of the problems described in the article are not limited to India. People need coaching/training for things they don't know about, parents have expectations, don't want to see their children failed and want to guide(or control, given the chance), people prefer easy ways to survive. Sure, culture makes difference but not everything is unique. It's just the magnitude of visibility due to population.<p>About quality content, well, have you checked out all github projects? In thousands of YouTube videos being uploaded daily, you can easily find "quality" content by searching it in native language. If mind blowing local newspapers articles are not your thing, you can still find a lot depending how you search through the noise.
Thanks for writing this. I do agree that the idea of resources being constrained and the mentality to do the minimum required to meet bar is quite prevalent — and the educated & well-paid aren't immune at all.<p>I can't generalize it, but I see a subtler version of this in the corporate spaces as well – lack of care towards accessibility, missing attention to details in PRs, focus on "getting things done" with the current knowledge set, not worrying too much about the "commons" .<p>I do hope though that this is a just a phase a developing nation has to go through — because we've seen more than enough exceptional talent originate from here as well.
Disclaimer: Indian<p>> We people like the wear the “tightly knit society” as badge of honour, let me tell you this “tightly knit society” has done more harm than good.<p>That is a sweeping statement that can be dismissed as garbage rightly. It would be better if author backs up with some examples on how he arrived at this conclusion. In any case, whether a tight knit society is good or bad for us is entirely subjective and should not be trivially generalized.<p>PS: The next line of the highlighted statement has some typo.<p>>We Indian people have no India of the amount of mental
Probably should be fixed.<p>Maybe author meant 'idea', but came of as 'India'
Thanks for this very detailed article. One of my own videos on GSoC from 3 years back is featured there, and looking back (hindsight is 2020, they say) I see how I was a part of the problem back then. I was naive to think I was just making people more aware and getting people into open source more.<p>Sadly the very people who need to understand this, care to watch spicy Youtube videos more than they care to read a nuanced article. Nevertheless, I'll share this with as many people I can.
Very well written. Couldn't have said this better myself, while also being politically correct.<p>Here is an old paper on the problem of coaching industry, written by someone at an IIT.<p><a href="https://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/hk/jee/press/currScienceJEE.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/hk/jee/press/currScienceJEE...</a><p>The coaching is a fucking big industry and it needs to stop if we want the currently best institutes keep sanity.
tl;dr because of population, people step on each other to feel 'successful' and get approved by their family/peers.<p>unfortunately this happens in many places if not all. (eg same cr*p applies here in Turkey, if you're male and not a doctor or engineer or government employee, basically seen as failure)<p>it is apperantly much more visible/causing problem because of lack of resources, strict cultural values as well as driven by high population
This is all a very long winded way to say "a popular YouTuber asked teenagers to do something and they did it". Take out all the cultural aspects of it, and an Instagram/TikTok/Twitch influencer doing this here in the USA would have the exact same result, so I'm not sure I buy all the later reasoning.