Many people have heard a famous saying: "If Mumbai doesn't work hard, it will be caught up by Shanghai!" "Previously, I only felt that this reflected the closedness and arrogance of many Indians. Recently, from the article of my photographer friend "With the Water", I understood the origin of this statement and the end of the peak circuit.
First of all, why mention Mumbai? Because Mumbai's position in India far exceeds Shanghai's position in China. There are many cities in China that are bustling, but Mumbai is unique in India to be "luxurious" and "advanced", which can be called magical and deformed.
The author's words are that India is simply using its national strength to build Mumbai's "face project". Before he first came to Mumbai in 2014, he had never seen a skyscraper in India. Delhi is a dilapidated city, and the Calcutta skyline is completely devoid of tall buildings. Run to Mumbai and realize that all the high-rise buildings in India are here!
Mumbai city from a drone perspective
You may wish to imagine that ordinary people in India, usually entering a county town is a grand thing, they came to Mumbai that can be more shocking than Liu Grandma entering the Grand View Garden,—— Wow, how can there be so many high-rise buildings? Must have been built with the help of God Vishnu? These people traveled from the Indian countryside to Mumbai as if they had traveled through a hundred years of time and space. Returning to their hometown, Mumbai has become an insurmountable future city in the minds of the Indian people.
Based on the limited imagination of the Indian people and the limited understanding of the world, everything on this earth except New York and London can barely compete with Mumbai! Shanghai, what is Shanghai... Many Indians don't know how to pronounce The Shanghai, they pronounce it Shan-Ghai – Mountain Cover.
You may ask: Don't Indians watch TV? Don't know what it's like anywhere else in the world?
The answer is: I don't know, because many Indians are so poor that they can't watch TV. What a sad answer...
In a slum in Delhi in 2014, a group of tricycle drivers sat around a tea stall watching a color TV that was visually measuring only 14 inches
The author's wife is Indian, and her family is in good condition, and she has had a TELEVISION since she was a child. But until around 2000 there were two channels, a news channel and an entertainment channel. News channels are inter-partisan attacks and self-aggrandizement, and entertainment channels are Bollywood movies and Rayman's Indian tv series.
Many people have heard that India's cultural industry is very developed, which is indeed worth learning from China. But at the same time, the powerful cultural industry has invisibly imprisoned Indians in a strange circle, limiting their understanding of the outside world.
Most Indian films over-glorify Indian society and life, with a 10-level beauty filter. In "Bollywood Life and Death", the houses of large families are luxurious like palaces, creating a Bollywood-style "Indian dream" for countless poor people.
The home of an Indian in the movie Devdas
The vast majority of Indians are also indifferent to foreign affairs. They live in small circles, and neighborhood gossip is much more meaningful to them than international news.
The author's wife went to Taiwan to study for a year and a half in 2014, and before going to Taiwan, she always thought that China was a poor country. Another particularly good Indian friend of the author, who taught yoga in China for 12 years, married a Chinese wife. He said he used to argue with Indians because they always belittled China and didn't believe the China he described, thinking that China was poor and backward. In the end he could only tell the Indians: "If you go to Shanghai, you will be so ashamed that you want to commit suicide." ”
Once Indians, living in their own indomitable illusions, think that the united states boss on the earth, india's second oldest, you say can not be happy?
Until they became netizens.
India has not experienced the wave of computer Internet in China from 1997 to 2012, and the vast majority of Indians have only been exposed to the Internet for the first time through smartphones since 2012. The popularity of smartphones has finally given indians a chance to understand the world, and they suddenly find that China, which they have long looked down on, has actually become the second oldest in the world, leaving India behind for twenty years. And their beloved India is so backward compared to other countries, which makes them unacceptable.
The people of India have been dreaming for decades and are suddenly awakened. As a result, in Gallup Consulting's Happiness Survey, India plummeted from 71st in 2014 to 144th in 2020, the tenth-to-last of a total of 153 countries.
In India, the happiness index has fallen dramatically over the past decade
Interestingly, for India's decline in the happiness list, the comments of Indian netizens have three categories: first, look at the good things done by the BJP and Modi, india will be worse if he continues to govern; second, this is because the Congress party spreads rumors all day long to make people panic, or because this survey report is carried out by the Congress Party; third, Pakistan is so much higher than India, which is definitely unscientific!
From here, we can see the Indian way of thinking: the problem is not thinking about how to solve it, but thinking about how to make the other party carry the pot.
By the way, Pakistan ranks 66th in the 2020 Happiness Report, which is indeed much higher than India. There is also Nepal 92nd and Bangladesh 107th, both ahead of India. The authors analyzed the data and found that they were all pulled up by the indicator "subjective feelings.". How meaningful this happiness is, everyone will have a difference.
In his usual exchanges, the author feels that most Indians today are disappointed, even desperate, in their country. More than one person felt that the country was rotten to the root and there was no cure. They see a modern, globalized new world through the Internet, and Indian society is incompatible with this new world, they can't find India's place and future in this world. On the other hand, the atmosphere of the Indian media and public opinion still follows the arrogance of the past, advocating nationalism and playing the emotional card, but it cannot give any solution to practical problems.
This tearing of rational cognition and emotional cognition is even reflected in the author's wife. She knows that there are all kinds of problems in Indian society, but if the author complains to her about India, she will most likely refute it. However, when she communicates with Indians, she always likes to blow China out of the sky, which makes the author embarrassed. This conflict of identity and cognition is a very interesting psychological phenomenon.
Of course, today's Indians no longer dare to say that Mumbai is better than Shanghai. Their entire lives are "Made in China", and even the mobile phones and satellite TV receivers they have recently used to promote "boycotting Made in China" are also made in China... While shouting to boycott Made in China, while frantically grabbing the new mobile phone of the Chinese brand,—— this hurts self-esteem is not good!
Finally, in the long run, the collapse of happiness among the Indian people is not a good thing. Humanity has lived in ignorance and ignorance in the dreams woven by religion, and it is only those who have woken up in pain that have brought human civilization to new heights. In today's era of globalization, those dreams must be awakened sooner or later. Only these Indian people, who have finally woken up, can take India in the right direction in the future.