Tag: Patriotism

National Pride.

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I am not quite a jingoist but like any patriot anywhere, I love my country with all its frustrating negatives too. I have also been under the impression that it is getting to be unfashionable to wear one’s pride in one’s nation on one’s sleeve, and was very pleasantly surprised with the findings of the Economist. India secures a fairly respectable position near the top contrary to my own expectations.

In July we had the Americans celebrating their indedpendence day with many bloggers doing so via their blog and just two weeks ago, India did its with attendant blog world spins. Even then, I was just mildly euphoric but what that could not achieve, this article did.

As many of my readers know, I am a strong believer in serendipity and one more instance to share with you. One of the blogs that I visit regularly and learn a lot from us Jim Belshaw’s Personal Reflections. On reading his post on his feeling depressed, I had left a link for this Economist article and he has posted a blog on it!

My two argumentative Indian friends, one an ardent Singaporean and the other a resident Indian will find solace that they are not all that different from each other when it comes to their respective positions in the list. Recently, both have been at their argumentative best about each other’s countries and this should help cool things down a bit.

Mariana of Change of Heart Stress Solutions can take heart from the position that Canada has secured on the list. Her post on Canada’s National Anthem was a delight to read and now I know why!

Conrad and other American readers may wish to talk about their take on the relatively poor showing by the USA on the list.

I leave it to Magpie11 and Grannymar to say something about Britain’s rather poor showing.

Middle Class Patriotism In The USA And India.

Thomas L Friedman of the New York Times is a world famous columnist and writer who is highly respected all over the world. He quotes American Vice-President hopeful Sarah Palin as addressing the other hopeful Biden as follows; “she turned to Biden and declared: “You said recently that higher taxes or asking for higher taxes or paying higher taxes is patriotic. In the middle class of America, which is where Todd and I have been all of our lives, that’s not patriotic.”

It is not the purpose of this post to explain what Mr. Friedman had to say in his piece. The purpose is to transpose this comment to India, and see quite how it fits with the Indian middle class, to which this writer belongs and which pays the maximum individual income tax in the country.

If any politician in India was to make the same comment about the Indian middle class, he will most likely get away with it. This is primarily because; the Indian middle class is almost entirely urban and semi-urban in composition. The big vote banks come from rural India where patriotism itself is a notion that does nothing to get or nor get votes. What matters there are totally different from what the tax paying middle class in India are concerned with.

The Indian middle class has a love hate relationship with income taxes. If it can get away without paying it, it will do so, primarily because it believes that the establishment, read politicians and babus make most of their income from either legitimate tax-free methods or, more often from unaccounted for black money. There is nothing immoral about this; it is just following role models.

If however, an Indian politician dependent entirely on the middle classes for his votes was to say what Ms. Palin had to say about the American middle classes, he can kiss his election good bye. For the Indian middle class, no matter what the provocation, their patriotism cannot be questioned. The same fellows who will not stand up when the national anthem is played will jump up and down like yo-yos if they were to be called unpatriotic.

Purely as a bystander and interested observer, I will be watching quite how the American middle class responds to this provocation from one of their possible future Presidents!

For my American readers, a question – What is your opinion on this?