"...making a desperate all-out effort as if your own life were at stake..." This may be specific to your (extended) family. While it is foolhardy to speak of any unified cultural milieu for India, I think it is fair to say that predestination has largely been accepted and reveals itself in the way our culture gave rise to rigid class stratification. And predestination, almost by definition, discourages risk-taking.
Within these class boundaries, you do have people striving to reach conventional goals, but rarely at risk to the family (which tends to be established early).
Also, the largest nurturing family structure, the Indian bureaucracy (where most of the educated Indian workforce was employed until the nineties) instills passivity and "do-just-enough-ness".
These value are changing, but the change is really glacial outside the few, truly cosmopolitan, western influenced cities and social strata.
No, it's not just a family thing. I'm not going to argue about abstract cultural values and philosophical systems. I'm just pointing out what actually happens.
I went to one of the IIT's. Unless you've been through the system, it's hard to imagine the level of parental and peer pressure the kids who train for the entrance exam face and the kind of work ethic it fosters in you. How many countries in the world do you think there are where it is common to go to boarding school for two years and forgo any kind of social life and a normal childhood just to have a shot at getting into a specific college? Pretty much just Japan, Korea and India.
Every year, hundreds of thousands of kids attempt the IIT. But that was just an example. In general, competition for resources is so scarce that it is common to make a Herculean effort to get things that are taken for granted in the developed world. Like a car.
I'm willing to admit that this might be an entirely urban phenomenon, and that rewards for hard work were much harder to come by in socialist India, until the early 90s. But we live in the new century, and a third of the country is now urban, where social stratification has largely broken down. That's more than the total population of the U.S.
Ah, well, I studied at an IIT too, (Madras [Ganga] 98-02 shoutout! :) ) and I do agree that the pressure to jump examination hurdles is rather intense, but this again is a case of striving for very conventional goals, and for a limited period of time.
How many have kept up the effort, after getting through (or not)?
As I said before, a conventional trajectory passing through a marriage in the mid-twenties, is also one that makes the uptake of risk (and consequently effort) much harder in life. I keep bringing up risk because effort without the possibility of significant success is rather pointless. And without risky opportunities that afford that kind of success, people reach for the cruise control after just-enough.
Malthusian scarcity should reward and select for effort, ( and also voluntary birth control and later marriage) as it did in the period right before Industrial England (([1] ; descriptive review: [2])), but, in India, it strangely doesn't! Predestiny, passivity, and fatalism, all predate socialist India. Our mythology reflects this.
I do agree that we are turning a new chapter and we are host to a whole new set of cultural ideas, but the numbers aren't, unfortunately, high enough. Yes, while about 300 million people, are (or were in 2001) technically urban, 50 million are slum dwellers; I'd wager that only a tiny slice is literate enough to accept cultural transmissions.
Still, I hope that this tiny slice of a humongous pie proves to be big enough....
> How many countries in the world do you think there are where it is common to go to boarding school for two years and forgo any kind of social life and a normal childhood just to have a shot at getting into a specific college? Pretty much just Japan, Korea and India.
Within these class boundaries, you do have people striving to reach conventional goals, but rarely at risk to the family (which tends to be established early).
Also, the largest nurturing family structure, the Indian bureaucracy (where most of the educated Indian workforce was employed until the nineties) instills passivity and "do-just-enough-ness".
These value are changing, but the change is really glacial outside the few, truly cosmopolitan, western influenced cities and social strata.