I don't know why but recently I have read tons of papers somewhat related to India, one big neighbor of China. Historically, when I was in China I didn't pay enough attention to India, expect for the last year when I was reading some papers on development and experiments. It seems that many economists like to target on India. The reason may be that India has a very large population, or the intervention from government is less compared countries like China.
Development issues are spilled all over the world. Even if in the developed countries, the social problems like racial discrimination, homosexual marriage, public health care, immigration, etc. are still remaining unsolved. However, in particularly from the economic perspective, it seems more possible to identify the cause or the so-called treatment effect with experiments, either natural or implemented by people. Therefore, to find a place without those targeting treatments before will be the ideal place to actually design and implement those trials. Of course, both those undeveloped countries in Africa and developing countries in Asia and South America will be good candidates. Among those, as an English-speaking country with huge population, India stands out.
It may not be fair to say that I care India more from the academic perspective rather than a more natural cultural attractiveness. India has its great culture by many means, which are worthy respecting. More often, I have been shocked by the diversity of cultural things. It is very hard for a person to judge something unbiased, or to tolerate the cultural difference easily. However, I’m trying to know more about it before making a judgment. My logic is very simple: you can only say something about one particular thing if you really know it well. Otherwise, imagination won’t help you to get a clear idea about what went, have gone and will go on in the future.
Although India and China are both regarded as the “eastern cultures”, the difference is still large. Religions, institutions, economic features… for instance, the area of arable land is bigger than what China has. Therefore, even the population grows in India is somehow out of control, they can still sustain (well, although the life standard is very low). Moreover, the confliction among religions is another big problem for India. Yes we have 56 ethnic groups in China, but Han counts for the primary group. In India, it is not as simple as this…
I’m feeling that now it is worthy spending time on learning a culture entirely instead of merely having a glance at it from several limited angles. A good way to start shall be movies. Yes, they have many fantastic movies 🙂
