[guybrushT]

There are 2 amazing things about this article: 1. It was written a while ago, and the general description of the country and its problems are just as true. 2. This quote: "In the eastern section of India, there is a company called Bengal Fertilizer, which was built in the early nineties. The government spent $1.2 billion on it and it took seven years to complete. It now employs 1550 people with complete work schedules, vacations, canteens, unions, etc. And yet they have never produced an ounce of fertilizer."

A good piece of writing - quite critical about the country, but also comes from a place of affection for the country.

[chimeracoder]

> A good piece of writing - quite critical about the country, but also comes from a place of affection for the country.

I'm not sure where you're reading "affection" from. Rogers has been predicting and even actively cheerleading India's financial decline consistently for literally two decades. He even closes the article with a claim that is laughably ignorant[0] of historical facts, and just reeks of colonial apologism.

> India really is not a rational country. The English mushed India together in the panic of independence in 1947, but little heed was given to ethnic, religious, linguistic, historic, national, or geographic considerations which is one reason India has had problems with every one of its neighbors since. India as we know it will not survive another 30 or 40 years. This of course does not have to end in disaster, but it probably will given the chauvinism of its government and the way history has always worked.

The reason that India has been at war is because the world's then-largest superpower[1] (the British) openly declared that they wanted to start a civil war in India, and then actively funded terrorist[2] groups to ensure that it happened.

There are people in the US who have affection for India. Rogers is not one of them.

[0] No, I don't think that Rogers is actually ignorant of history; I'm saying he chooses to ignore history.

[1] India's fight for independence was just around the time that the US took over that epithet from the British

[2] That word didn't exist then, but that's absolutely what we would call them today

[dragonwriter]

Re: "terrorists" and India at the time of independence

> That word didn't exist then, but that's absolutely what we would call them today

It had actually existed for about a century and half before that, and had been used in the modern sense (including referring to non-state and subnational actors, often directing violence against a state, rather than the original use referring to terrorism strictly in the sense of a top-down means of state control originating with the French Revolution's Reign of Terror and its architects, the original "terrorists") for about 70-80 years prior to Indian independence.

[IkmoIkmo]

Agreed, in fact just last week I was just watching a Dutch program I recalled watching back in 2005 when I was a teenager, it was basically a conversation that Rogers and Marc Faber and another guy had on their ideas of the future. Then India came along and he was incredibly negative and dismissive and that stood out to me as being over the top. Here I am a week later, surprised to see a topic on just that (Rogers about India) and not surprised to find comments like yours.