[vertex-four]

The thing is - every state in India has its own language, more-or-less. Either you can translate into every single language at extreme cost, or you can use either Hindi or English. Of the two, English is likely slightly wider-spoken these days.

India doesn't have a language which you can be guaranteed nearly everyone will speak. English is the closest thing for the classes that are being targeted for ecommerce.

Aside from that... looking at your comment history, you seem to really hate India. Any particular reason?

[rmah]

While you are correct, those states are not small.

The number of native speakers for top five major languages as of 2001 are:

    Hindi (and dialects)  422 mil
    Bengali  83 mil
    Telugu   74 mil
    Marathi  72 mil
    Tamil    61 mil

These are not insignificant populations. If you add in Bengali speakers in Bangladesh, the total hits 189 mil.

It's easier to think of India the way you think of EU: an aggregation of peoples and cultures under a political umbrella. As an example, sure many people in germany speak english, but would you really try to seriously gain entry into the german market without localizing into german?

[yummyfajitas]

This is of course true. But generally speaking, most of the folks who speak these languages but don't speak Hindi also don't have much money and may not even have internet.

In Maharashtra, virtually every middle class person speaks English and Hindi in addition to Marathi. Auto drivers or street vendors will speak only Hindi and Marathi. Of the people I've encountered who don't speak Hindi, most were cooks/maids/similar.

A peripherally related question: is it worth translating your software into Dutch? 90% of the Netherlands speaks English and by having English you've also covered the UK. So it's probably not worth it.

Now lets compare the Netherlands to Maharashtra. The GDP of the Netherlands is $850B (16M people). The GDP of Maharashtra is about $400B (for 110M people). Half that GDP is just Mumbai (about 20M people) and Mumbai is disproportionately a place where English and Hindi work well.

If you are very forward thinking (10+ years), it might be worthwhile gambling that gaining a foothold in regional languages today might pay off when those regions grow. But that's a very long play.

[fractalb]

You may get by with Hindi in Maharashtra, but that's not true in southern states and the North-East

[yummyfajitas]

I get by with English and broken Hinglish in Pune and Mumbai. Those are the cities with internet and money. That wouldn't work so well in smaller cities, but those are also not the places I'd target if I were building a business.

As for the south, in my limited experience the same is true. English works fine in Bangalore if you restrict your conversations to upper middle class people with good internet and money to spend.

[erbdex]

> But generally speaking, most of the folks who speak these languages but don't speak Hindi also don't have much money and may not even have internet.

About a 100M people in India know English out of a population of 1.3 Billion. It is only the MNC service sector wherein know-english-have-money holds true. The larger chunk of India's income is generated by people who do not know English or Hindi(~800 Million people fall into this bucket).

[vertex-four]

And yet if you could enter Germany with the same marketing you give to the UK... wouldn't you?

There's a lot of markets which get left out when a company expands to "the EU" - which often means Germany, France, Spain, Italy, and maybe one or two other countries.

[ittekimasu]

As someone who studies culture (as you can tell), my hate is reserved for the neo-colonial entities and the bourgeoisie they cultivate to stay in power. If you call such entities by the names the kakistocracies christen, then yes, I hate most states in the global south.

India, like China, however was a historic center (天竺 - heaven axis they called it) unlike most in the global south. To see it brought to the same level as sub-saharan Africa is painful; to realize there are deep structural issues that will keep it that way is even more so. Hate, yes, for the fat maggots feeding on the dying corpses - but that too is a distraction, for it's not the maggots' fault.

Rhetorical devices of the form "ah, but that's the our only way towards progress", will not be answered to. I'm tired of worn narrative, you lot bombard me with.

[Retric]

Focusing on 'Culture' is blinding you to what's going on. Tribal cultures are inherently economically inferior due to scaling issues. Western culture is not the only way forward, but the limitation is not the specific ideas, but rather the level of organizational structure.

Stable and mature underground economy's for example operate based on reputation not just tribe. As allegiance to even arbitrary tribes (crips vs bloods) limits commerce. Nation states are arbitrary and transitory, however when larger groups of people limit us vs. them to those outside the nation the internal economy's has fewer self imposed barriers.

PS: China demonstrates other failure points, but as a very non western culture they still show the same trends.

[oblio]

As always for these kinds of tirades: what's your proposed alternative?

[snovv_crash]

Hasn't India always been like that though, with the caste system? Nobody writes epics about the person who dug Arjuna's toilets, and so we see the past through rose-coloured lenses.

[gajjanag]

Nobody has written epics about anyone digging someone else's toilets as far as I know. This is not unique to the Mahabharatha or other Indian epics.

As for the caste system, yes, it has had a lot of evils. But then almost all populations around the world have some notion of "class" that is loosely defined, with its own set of evils. I fail to see how this is unique to India, see for instance the topic of ghettos in medieval history. In modern times, the "class" is usually based on financial wealth.

Furthermore, in the sense of classification based on profession (the idealistic interpretation of caste), this certainly exists across the world (merchant guilds, high concentrations of a single occupation like Harley St, London, etc).

Finally, as for viewing the past through rose-coloured lenses, every historian has his/her own set of biases in terms of coverage and emphasis. There are some who are honest about the reality of this, such as Howard Zinn who mentions it in his preface to "A People's History of the United States", but many delude themselves into thinking that they somehow are magically "unbiased".

With respect to works of fiction, the same applies. In the case of Tolkien, the treatment of the orcs is an example, we never see an orc perspective or pov. In the case of the Song of Ice and Fire, there is arguably little treatment of the common population. Military engagements are reduced to the standard historical style focusing on the leaders and "important" entities involved. As for the Mahabharatha, similar issues arise. Nevertheless, it has a surprising amount of depth and complexity in many respects (e.g morally grey characters and a bittersweet ending).

[otabdeveloper]

> we never see an orc perspective or pov

Offtopic, but this is false. There's a whole chapter of orcish perspective at the end of book IV.

[gajjanag]

Not a whole chapter, but yes, I had forgotten the exchange near Cirith Ungol.

[pakhibagai]

Granted that India has structural issues. Which country doesn't? A good look at the American presidential election 2016 tells us all.

[ittekimasu]

America, for all its deficiencies, does not expect its citizens to be loyal to a foreign culture or language, in order to come up in life. Some idiot being elected to the throne is not going to change the U.S, nor will it change the fact that US's GDP per-capita is about 25-30x that of India.

[selimthegrim]

So for those countries that weren't historic centers, their optimal fate is to put up with a comprador boot in their face, forever?

[ittekimasu]

Strawman.

Actually I have greater hopes for Africa, considering that nothing on the likes of,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decolonising_the_Mind

has emerged out of the sub-continent.

Edit: This has an excerpt,

http://swaraj.org/ngugi.htm

[selimthegrim]

I suppose the names Eqbal Ahmed and Tariq Ali mean nothing to you?

[ittekimasu]

Tell me, other than mimic ing whatever is fashionable in London, Berkeley and Paris, what exactly has the "Left" done in Africa, S. Asia and S. America ? Fashion, in general, is apparently the operational semantics of the ostensibly unpowdered and unperfumed.

[selimthegrim]

Thomas Sankara was no slouch.