Education and superstition coexisted in unsettling ways, often with perverse consequences. At my elite engineering college, many students began flocking to temples as examinations approached—sometimes even traveling long distances. Others sought comfort in the growing number of cults that had mushroomed across the country, each tailored to soothe a particular anxiety or offer an escape from pressure.
Yet they were not seeking peace, harmony, or spiritual insight—none of which Indian religions, focused on idolatry and ritual worship rather than virtues or commandments, are structured to provide. Instead, they gave monetary donations or undertook rituals of self-denial to appease their chosen deity. The choice of god was entirely pragmatic: whichever one was reputed to deliver the desired outcome—most often passing exams or securing a US visa.
What united all these acts was their intensely transactional nature. It was a marketplace—not of ideas, but of divine favors—where gods and gurus were “bought” with offerings, rituals, or suffering—ironically and hypocritically—in exchange for worldly rewards. The appeal lay not in introspection, personal growth, or moral elevation—none of which found any place in the collective consciousness—but in outsourcing accountability to a higher power. This ethos of divine negotiation—rooted not in faith but in fear and convenience—mirrored the larger moral and institutional disorder surrounding us.
These students could easily solve complex differential equations, yet they irrationally believed that bribing gods could boost their grades. Their scientific education had failed to instill objectivity or critical self-reflection. Despite years of rigorous training, their “mental operating systems” remained irrational, unscientific, and superstitious. This wasn’t an individual failing—it was institutional. Professors tolerated it, families encouraged it, and elite graduates carried it abroad, repackaging superstition as “tradition” or “cultural identity.”
They proudly displayed talismans and charms collected from temples, mistaking external tokens for inner strength. But this confidence—rooted in external authority rather than self-knowledge—was fragile. It led to severe mood swings and, all too often, culminated in existential crises.
The same superstitious approach to religion—in which the follower depends on divine whims—permeated daily life, professional ethics, and social interactions. Personal responsibility was easily abdicated; blame was assigned to fate, astrological misalignment, or divine displeasure when outcomes fell short. This mindset shaped how they led teams, voted, and raised children—placing faith in luck and hierarchy over foresight, integrity, or reason. Whether in governance or personal ambition, long-term planning gave way to short-term maneuvering, quick fixes, and ritualistic appeasements.
This deep-rooted aversion to responsibility and reason did not remain confined to religion—it shaped the very fabric of Indian institutions, from governance to education. A materialistic approach to religion precludes the possibility of spirituality. A psyche incapable of introspection or transcendence becomes grounded in unrestrained materialism and base, animalistic impulses. In such an environment, truth and integrity lose all value; expediency and convenience prevail. Appeals to authority figures—whether gods, bureaucrats, or foreign powers—abound, revealing a deep-seated dependency.
This fostered a subservient mindset, always looking outward for rescue or validation. The result is a population that remains sheepish, beset by identity crises, and psychologically reduced to a posture of mental beggary—an outlook fundamentally incompatible with true spirituality.
India serves as a tragic laboratory: a place where the mental and moral devastation wrought by paganism, idolatry, and polytheism can be observed even among the otherwise intellectually capable. With so many gods to choose from, students frequently switched allegiances—engaging in a vernacular version of Pascal’s Wager, hedging their bets across multiple deities. To an outsider, this behavior might appear tolerant or even secular. However, this so-called tolerance did not stem from respect for difference or a commitment to pluralism; it emerged from a fundamental indifference to objectivity, values, morality, and rationality.
This left Indian modernity hollow—mimicking forms without inheriting the spirit. Nowhere was this hollowness more evident than in its elite institutions, where knowledge was acquired without wisdom and credentials carried no trace of conscience.
Tolerance without virtue is not enlightenment. It is a moral wasteland: a space where anything goes, where sin and base desire roam unchecked. Such permissiveness, rather than fostering harmony, anchors society in stagnation. It leads inevitably toward savagery and barbarism. From this chaos, hatred, sadism, unrestrained violence—and ironically, intolerance—erupt not by design but by random eruption.
Meanwhile, the well-meaning outsider, unaware of the exploitative systems embedded in daily life, might mistake entropy for pluralism and moral decay for cultural richness. This misreading only deepens the dysfunction, as global narratives validate—and even romanticize—local disorder as “diverse” or “authentic.” The result is a nation misrepresented both within and without—praised for its chaos, defended for its dysfunction, and shielded from scrutiny by the very ideals it fails to uphold.
Decades later, I would realize that the superficial coating of engineering—or even general education—failed to disrupt magical thinking in otherwise high-IQ individuals. Worse, it inoculated them against self-examination and shielded the foundational flaws in their mental operating systems from scrutiny.
Many of these individuals from India’s elite would go on to earn, by Indian standards, extravagant salaries in the United States, yet paradoxically grew more nationalistic, tribal, and dogmatic in their Indian identity and ritualistic beliefs. Their material success abroad did not reflect the triumph of Indian thought but rather its insulation—preserved within a foreign system that harnessed their technical competence like shiny, compliant cogs. They were not contributing to Western values; they were merely operating within them, untouched by their spirit.
Contrary to conventional wisdom—including that of the World Bank and other global institutions—every good thing the West offered to India was eventually perverted, corrupted, or degraded. These institutions and values did not emerge from Indian cultural soil; they were externally grafted, never truly rooted. As a result, they were adopted superficially, without the moral, philosophical, or institutional foundations necessary to sustain them. What appeared on paper as democracy or modernity was, in practice, something else entirely—hollow forms animated by pre-modern instincts.
Education, prosperity, and even female empowerment yielded paradoxically regressive outcomes. This was not because these forces were inherently flawed but because they operated atop a mental substratum that remained irrational and amoral. “Education” acquired through rote memorization merely added weight, not insight; it burdened the mind rather than illuminating it.
Without the cultivation of reason or moral inquiry, the cultural mechanisms that enable evolution and refinement broke down. Success—enabled by Western technology and institutions—required no internal transformation. The illusion that irrationality and amorality could drive progress only solidified, turning dysfunction into a self-reinforcing system.
One might have expected globalization and economic liberalization to erode superstition and erratic behavior. Instead, they emboldened them. Exposure to global markets and modern technologies did not inspire introspection; it merely cloaked magical thinking in the sleek vocabulary of modernity—words like “manifestation,” “energy,” or “alignment” replacing older religious terms. This unresolved tension—between technological sophistication and pre-modern mental habits—came to define the Indian middle class.
Cults proliferated, often led by self-declared godmen—some barely out of adolescence. These babas exploited a mass psychological insecurity and the moral vacuum that accompanied newfound material success. With no genuine philosophical or ethical foundation, they filled the void with spectacle and submission.
Their appeal did not lie in truth, discipline, or self-transcendence. Instead, they offered comfort without responsibility—rituals in place of reason and blind obedience in place of thought. In surrendering their minds to theatrics, individuals outsourced their anxieties and, more fatally, their agency.
The internet and television did not foster dialogue—they amplified dogma. Smartphones brought unprecedented access to information, but the minds receiving it remained untouched by reason or introspection. WhatsApp forwards circulated endlessly—peddling myths of ancient grandeur, exaggerated tales of colonial villainy, and fantasies of modern progress, from moral exceptionalism to space-age triumphs. The self-deluding Indian mind absorbed these uncritically. Economic growth only extended the reach of tribalism rather than dissolving it. The result was a society armed with modern tools yet governed by medieval instincts.
This fusion of modern technology with pre-modern thinking produced a uniquely unstable society that mimicked the forms of democracy, science, and secularism without ever grasping their underlying ethos. Institutions existed but were hollowed out; laws were written but corruptly enforced; elections were held, but voters acted out of caste, fear, or fanaticism—not conscience. The modern Indian citizen, armed with a degree and a smartphone, still knelt before babas, caste lords, or political strongmen—seeking protection rather than justice. In such a setting, truth had no presence, reason was easily overruled by sentiment, and the language of progress was routinely used to sanctify regression. What emerged was not a modern republic but a deeply superstitious technocracy—shiny, at least to some eyes, on the surface, but rotten at the core.
India’s rising profile on the global stage—bolstered by its sheer population, falsely perceived market potential, and a diaspora eager to elevate India’s image out of tribal insecurity—has created the illusion of national ascent. But this image is profoundly misleading. The world sees surface-level metrics: GDP growth, routinely manipulated; software exports, the result of a one-off historical quirk that made India the secretarial back office of the West; and a space mission cobbled together with borrowed concepts, imported hardware, and repackaged foreign software—not in the spirit of progress, but as a tool for domestic demagoguery and spectacle, squandering taxpayer money for political gain.
Foreign admirers, eager to celebrate multiculturalism or “diversity,” mistake noise for vibrancy and vulgarity for authenticity. But a society cannot thrive on spectacle, slogans, or demographics alone. Without truth, order, and moral ambition, what appears as rising is merely swelling; what looks like progress is often just inertia in motion. India is not the exception—it is the warning. It shows what happens when a society adopts modern instruments without internalizing the values that gave rise to them.
Whatever faint virtues the British once instilled—order, civility, restraint—have long since dissipated. When I was growing up, people aspired to refinement. Table manners, composure, and class were admired. Today, such traits are ridiculed, even despised. In a society where virtue is mocked and vulgarity rewarded, decay is not an accident but the norm.
Meritocracy has been upended—eroded by regression to pre-colonial mentalities and by the perverse incentives enabled by Western technology. When success no longer hinges on virtue, reason, or merit—but merely on access to borrowed tools—a Darwinian disincentive for moral and intellectual development takes hold.
What remains is a society that reaps the benefits of modernity while steadily reverting to ancestral patterns. Perhaps calling these “dysfunctions” means imposing a Western framework. From another perspective, India is not decaying—it is simply returning to what is natural. This cultural mismatch—between imported modernity and indigenous instincts—reveals a national tragedy and a profound philosophical rift between societies built on reason and those sustained by ritual.
Easy prosperity has discouraged any impulse toward self-improvement. Wealth is amassed not as a means to a higher purpose but out of inertia—mindless accumulation with no moral architecture to guide it. In the absence of reason and ethical striving, wealth ceases to uplift. It becomes a prop in social theater—a signal of status, a stage for spectacle. In such a setting, prosperity reflects not progress but cultural emptiness.
What India—and, indeed, any Third World society—needed was not merely education or economic growth but a profound immersion in Western logic and reason, a moral awakening, a hunger for truth, a sense of justice, and the cultivation of personal honor.
In retrospect, this was precisely what many Christian missionaries and other Western reformers had attempted for centuries—sometimes even by removing children from their cultural environments, hoping to shield them from early indoctrination into magical thinking and tribal anchoring. And yet, despite generations of effort, they barely made a dent. The failure was not in the message but in the recipient’s incapacity—or unwillingness—to receive it.
This forces a difficult question: Should we reconsider our entire approach to civilizing pre-modern societies? Or must we concede that some cultures may be impervious to reform—they are what they are and cannot be fundamentally changed? Worse still, external interventions meant to uplift them may not lead to elevation but to a degeneration—a deeper, more insidious form of collapse disguised as development.
Perhaps the highest wisdom lies not in intervention but in recognizing the tragic boundaries of what can—and cannot—be transformed. The West took several millennia to root its psyche in reason and moral values. No top-down reform could shortcut that long, organic process in India.
True creativity is spiritual, with truth-seeking at its core. Unless the psyche understands that universal principles are objective—and that gods are neither arbitrary nor capricious—even the most advanced applied science remains shallow. Among my peers, academic interest was largely superficial: a utilitarian means to pass exams and secure a ticket to the United States. Without moral depth and conceptual clarity, knowledge becomes a hollow tool—practical but never truly transformative.
Except for one individual, every classmate of mine emigrated. In India, there are even temples dedicated solely to securing US visas. Even as students pursued American dreams, they remained tethered to rituals rooted in a feudal past. Technology enabled them to stay in their virtual ghettos, never fully assimilating and ironically becoming intellectually inbred—caught between a foot in the US and another in their Third World homeland, forever confused about their identity. Their children, often unaware of the harsh realities that drove their parents to leave, tended to romanticize those Third World origins—contradicting the myth of assimilation in the next generation.
