People often project their values onto others. But cultural frameworks can be profoundly alien. What passes for virtue in one society may be incomprehensible—or nonexistent—in another. Predictably, well-meaning interventions from the outside often fail to achieve their intended goals. Without grasping the moral foundation of a culture, outsider solutions rarely reach the root and usually exacerbate the rot.
What looks like righteous indignation in Indians—especially to Western observers shaped by the Ten Commandments—is often just fury at being out-scammed, deprived, or physically harmed. Virtue-signaling comes easily to those who lack inner values or original thought. Indian moral posturing is mostly for Western eyes, where it can yield material or reputational gain. Within India, moral appeals carry no weight and instead invite ridicule. Conscience is not a private compass but a public costume—worn only when it might be seen.
The Indian mind, in its unaltered state—untouched by Western ideas—shuns moral reflection. For those who believe they’ve “arrived,” nothing is more gratifying than testing power and watching others suffer. Sadism becomes self-affirmation. It is not enough to cause pain; prolonging another’s suffering becomes a performance of superiority. The ultimate thrill is not justice or truth, but the sight of others on their knees, begging.
The powerless imitate this in another register. During highly charged spectacles—such as when a girl publicly claims victimhood—crowds gather not to uphold justice but to revel in the drama. Disinterested in evidence, they perform “chivalry” through mob energy: blind to their cowardice, drunk on shared chaos. It is not solidarity, but the thrill of spectacle—a counterfeit belonging forged in hatred.
In such frenzied states, individuals dissolve into the mob, feeling momentarily invincible, as if even the impossible lies within reach. But sooner or later, they collide with reality and collapse under its weight, as evidenced by India’s wretchedness, dysfunction, and lawlessness. Yet in that moment, the illusion of power is intoxicating and cathartic, numbing them to their own pain and humiliating existence.
This reveals a deeper pathology: the mimicry of Western moral language without the culture of introspection that gave rise to it. Words like “justice,” “equality,” and “human rights” are wielded not as moral commitments but as tools of leverage. Had India never encountered the West, such hypocrisy might not exist. But mimicry without soul corrodes, not uplifts. Stripped of their roots and filtered through corrupt systems and unformed minds, these terms collapse into incoherence.
A real community requires discipline, goodwill, and moral clarity—virtues that cannot take root in minds addicted to noise, chaos, and spectacle. Civilization does not emerge from nature; it is forged over millennia through restraint, trust, and moral effort. It grows not in frenzy, but in the quiet labor of responsibility and mutual regard.
And so India drapes its primal urges in borrowed virtue—never confronting the abyss within, only decorating it. What remains is moral staleness and cultural decay. Tribes—never “noble savages” to begin with—have, in imitating a Western façade, devolved into slums fouled by sewage, plagued by disease, and ruled by opportunism and crime.
Western observers often mistake Indian gestures for evidence of shared values. But what they see is not empathy—it is simulation.
In the West, conscience was shaped through centuries of religious introspection, legal reasoning, and philosophical debate, yielding an inner moral law responsive to something higher than group identity or convenience. In India, by contrast, magical thinking and herd instinct prevail.
Western institutions emerged only after a critical mass of individuals began to think in moral and rational terms. The spark of conscience came first. Institutions were built to preserve and transmit those hard-won insights. At least in principle, they exist to cultivate independent judgment, moral reasoning, and accountability to something beyond blood, tribe, or caste. They orient the mind toward truth.
Legal institutions in India were not the fruit of moral or philosophical insight—colonial powers imposed them. Once handed over to Indian control, the spirit of justice, institutional restraint, and the rule of law were gutted and perverted. Bureaucrats extract bribes—and take sadistic pleasure in doing so.
Severed from any moral foundation, institutions lose meaning. In a culture where virtues are unrewarded and even punished, character is a liability. Survival depends not on principle, but on cunning.
Whether in the family, at school, in the temple, or in the state, Indian institutions exist primarily to control, entrench hierarchy, and enable predation. Teachers demand rote obedience. Religious leaders enforce hollow rituals, not reflection. The individual’s moral development is not merely neglected—it is systematically crushed.
It took me more than a year of living in the UK even to begin grasping what “truth” meant. Until then, truth was simply whatever worked in the moment, whatever was most expedient.
Until this fundamental divergence between the West and India is acknowledged, one side will continue to believe it is engaged in a shared moral conversation. At the same time, the other will merely calculate how best to exploit its terms.
Christian missionaries and British administrators tried to awaken a moral conscience in India. But after three centuries, their influence remained largely superficial. Whatever gains were made have since decayed into mimicry—gestures without conviction, language without inner transformation. Lacking deep roots, these borrowed ideals now obstruct real, bottom-up reform.
What is often mistaken for “honor” in India is, in truth, ego. When a daughter is raped, the family’s first instinct is not to seek justice, but to suppress the event. Were it true honor they wished to preserve, they would hunt down the perpetrator without pause. But it is not virtue they fear losing—it is face. What drives them is not moral outrage but social embarrassment.
What we call “honor killing” should, more truthfully, be called “ego killing.”
Without a moral or rational compass, expediency and material gratification become the only guides. Even the superficial shame imposed by colonial presence has long since faded. However, that shame was never internalized—it was merely a superficial layer, incapable of penetrating the deeper structure of Indian psychology.
Many marriage-age Indian girls fast weekly for Lord Shiva, hoping to secure “good husbands.” But in this cultural lexicon, what counts as “good”? Ask, and the answer almost always revolves around financial status and fair skin. Skin-lightening creams, including those marketed for intimate areas, dominate the cosmetics market. Parents openly inquire about the bribes a prospective groom receives.
In India, corruption carries no stigma; the corrupt are admired for their ability to extract and manipulate. Power—not character—is the highest virtue. This logic defines what matters to the bride, her family, and society as a whole.
Guilt and gratitude are hard to find.
I remember the arranged marriage of a female relative. Nearly a hundred people from the groom’s side traveled from a distant city. As hosts, my grandfather and father bore all expenses and provided the dowry. But after the ceremony—once the bride had moved to the groom’s hotel—the family made a fresh demand for a substantial additional dowry. They hinted at returning the bride if the payment wasn’t made—a threat they knew would never be acted upon, since the marriage had been consummated.
In a society where apathy is the norm, where relatives gossip about your pain or quietly savor it, there was no choice but to scramble for the money, whatever the cost, however deep the shame. This is life in a culture built on mistrust, where institutions are arbitrary and power overrides principle.
I remember the sinking feeling of that night—a familiar, formless dread I had grown up with, one that clung to me for decades, even after I left India. It was a floating abstraction, unmoored from anything objective. Born of arbitrariness, it defied resolution through simple introspection.
Despite years of inner work—deconstructing the mind and rebuilding it from the ground up—the scars remain, along with many unknown unknowns. I still catch myself hesitating over matters that, had my cognitive wiring been cleaner—fewer scars, more moral resoluteness—would feel instinctively clear.
The work was not just about managing anxiety, but about dismantling the very structure of thought and decision-making. Without a taught social conduct and mental skills rooted in reason and morality—a kind of civilizational hardwiring of the mind—the raw instincts of the flesh, and what might be called sins—envy, lust, covetousness—govern it. If such a mind is intelligent, it simply rationalizes its sinful nature.
This is the Catch-22: how does one use such a mind to resolve its own problems? Even someone who longs for change must spend decades—perhaps a lifetime—in a Sisyphean task. Which is precisely why almost no one dares to begin.
Amorality produces a social horror, leaving no one truly better off. Among the poor, life is governed by a poverty instinct—an unthinking surrender to impulse, a compulsive descent into short-term gratification. Worse, every decision seems to spiral downward, almost suicidally, as if their compass points toward the cesspool—one a rational observer might not even know existed, let alone imagine anyone would return to after being offered a way out. “The dog returns to its vomit, and the sow that was washed returns to her wallowing in the mud.” Offer them opportunities, extend help, and yet they slide back—effortlessly, almost mechanically—into the same wretchedness.
Among the powerful, things are no better. They are atomized and paranoid; the closer they are to someone, the less they trust them. Their days are consumed by scheming, extracting, and indulging the same base instincts. Even when they succeed financially, they remain anxious and joyless. Once their youth fades, their bodies and minds begin to decay. Their wealth—often built on the mindset of expropriation of public resources—leaves them in an ecology that is ugly, polluted, unsafe, and spiritually barren. Their children, raised without conscience or purpose, grow up self-absorbed, incapable of value creation—a liability, and often, their greatest threat. Intelligence without morality may be an engine, but it is a rudderless one.
Someone raised in a society grounded in morality and reason might assume that shedding magical thinking, creating a moral fabric, or escaping the anxiety bred by an arbitrary, Orwellian environment, is as easy as flipping a switch. But that is projection. He mistakes his own moral and cognitive framework for a universal baseline. Moral people struggle to grasp the nature of evil and depravity; intelligent people, the depth of stupidity.
I often wonder what the emotional inner world must look like for others, especially young girls from lower castes growing up in the slums. If one dared to psychoanalyze it honestly, one might not find agency or reflection at all, but something mechanical, almost unconscious—a mind shaped not by values, but by raw survival.
On the many occasions I’ve tried to help, I’ve rarely encountered righteous indignation. What I found instead was a readiness to barter dignity for crumbs. They were sheepish—unable or unwilling to assert themselves—and betrayed those trying to help, without guilt, without hesitation. There was no horizon of tomorrow—only the hunger and bargaining of now.
I once had a maid—a beautiful woman in her early thirties—with six or seven children, all of whom were daughters, except for the youngest. One day, she arrived with one side of her face so swollen that her eye had nearly vanished. She confided in me about her life.
As a young girl, she had been kidnapped by a man and locked away in a remote village, completely cut off from escape or help. In her world, a girl who had been raped was seen as public property. Her family would have disowned her, society would have shunned her, and no institution would offer protection or support—she knew instinctively that the very systems meant to guard the vulnerable preyed on them.
The man who had abducted her became, in time, the person I came to know as her husband.
Naive and idealistic, I encouraged her to report the incident to the police and enroll her daughters in school. Then one day, I noticed that her eldest, around thirteen years old, had been missing for several days. Calmly, almost casually, she told me she had sent the girl to someone unknown, far from Delhi. She had, in effect, sold her own daughter to sexual slavery.
It became clear she was not just a victim of her culture, but a vessel for perpetuating it. I gave up trying to change her world. These days, I observe events in India as I would a documentary—distant, unalterable, and morally inert. It is what it is. Indignation has no purchase in a society without moral architecture.
Many of society’s ills are intricately intertwined. Whether through fear, ignorance, or self-interest, whole communities become complicit. These abuses cannot be undone by law or policy alone—especially in a culture that lacks the will, the conscience, or the imagination to change.
Women being arrested and then raped at police stations is tragically common. When I was at university, a group of boys visited a prostitute. The police raided the brothel, took a bribe, and let the boys go. The woman was detained. I later learned she could barely walk the next day—raped by the very officers sworn to protect her. The judge showed no interest in her condition. Society believed she had gotten what she deserved.
Fairness and justice are alien concepts to Indians. Ask someone to be considerate, and they often laugh. Worse still, many take pleasure in cruelty.
When I first lived in the UK, I had very little money. I survived on rotten potatoes, boiled rice, baked beans, and peanut butter. Yet many who knew my situation helped me find work. Institutions supported me, though, in hindsight, it was not their duty to assist an international student who claimed he could support himself.
In India, the opposite holds true: the higher one rises, the more predatory and sadistic one becomes. Every institutional interaction is transactional. Favors are granted with condescension and always come at a price. Strangers constantly size you up. If you come from a lower-class family, you face open abuse, exploitation, and degradation.
Over time, media exposure and Western feminist influence produced a patchwork of pro-women laws. But these laws were built on sand. Without the philosophical foundations that guided British legal reform—principles such as individual rights, due process, and moral reasoning—these laws yielded unintended consequences, exacerbating the situation. Concepts such as individual rights, due process, and universal justice—born from centuries of legal evolution in the West—found no fertile soil in India. The result was not justice, but distortion.
Without a moral culture, institutions decay into tools of manipulation and control, perpetuating the very abuses they claim to prevent. The police continued to prey on the most vulnerable—poor women and orphaned boys—where sodomy was disturbingly common. Male victims who sought help at police stations were mocked, dismissed, or further victimized.
The new legal framework enabled imprisonment based solely on accusations of rape, without requiring evidence. A woman could live with a man for years and later accuse him of rape throughout the relationship. In a functioning system, such claims would warrant serious investigation. Instead, a toxic combination of cowardice, opportunism, stupidity, and corruption caused police to shirk their duties. They passed unexamined cases to the courts, focusing instead on extracting bribes.
Corrupt judges, eager to appear virtuous, accepted a woman’s word at face value—even when evidence suggested otherwise—condemning men to prison as cases dragged on for years or decades. More commonly, however, the judge took a hefty bribe on the first day and let the accused walk free.
Over time, many middle-class women came to believe they could act with impunity. Today, any legal dispute involving a woman is reflexively recast as sexual assault, regardless of evidence or facts. Meanwhile, most genuine cases of rape go unreported. It is not uncommon for a real victim who insists on pursuing justice against a powerful man to vanish with police complicity.
In a society steeped in cowardice, subservience, intellectual laziness—and indeed, cuckishness—people habitually believe a woman’s word over objective truth. Indian men exalt women publicly while surrendering moral authority within their own homes. Mothers wield near-total control over child-rearing, shaping the emotional and ethical worldview of the next generation. In practice, India is not a patriarchy but a matriarchy—one that rules through emotional blackmail, superstition, and passive domination rather than moral guidance or rational order.
This emotional matriarchy leaves a deep imprint on children. Boys grow up without a model of principled masculinity, facing only a choice between tyrannical fathers and emotionally manipulative mothers. Girls learn that power lies in passive aggression, guilt, and appearance. The result is a society where neither gender is equipped to think morally, act rationally, or take responsibility. Children are not taught to cultivate conscience or independent judgment; instead, they absorb a worldview shaped by superstition, shame, and emotional coercion—passed down uncritically from one generation to the next.
It is crucial to emphasize that the public exaltation of women in India is not rooted in respect because respect, as a virtue, requires both morality and reason. What masquerades as reverence is a projection of women’s perceived sexual power, mixed with a shallow substitute for intimacy and self-worth. But this idolization is unstable. Just as a powerful man is swiftly cut down when he loses status, a woman who appears vulnerable—especially before a faceless crowd of men—can quickly become a target. Without moral foundations, the same impulses that worship her can turn predatory in an instant.
Women should have gained awareness of their rights. However, the very idea of rights does not take root in a culture where moral introspection and rational thought have never been cultivated. Without that foundation, any privilege extended to women is quickly weaponized, stripped of principle, and bent to serve personal advantage. Such privileges are not even well-meaning to begin with; they are granted for the sake of demagoguery.
When I was growing up, profanity marked you as low-class. Boys and girls sat in separate rows, and girls dressed modestly, with legs and chests fully covered. Promiscuity was unheard of in small-town life, though rumors attributed it to remote villages untouched by Victorian shame. Divorce was virtually nonexistent. Even drinking was hidden: bars had curtained booths, and alcohol itself was a source of quiet disgrace.
Then came the internet. It opened up unprecedented communication channels with the West and flooded India with opportunity. As the country absorbed vast amounts of the West’s back-office work, many believed this exposure would educate, uplift, and civilize Indians. Closer connection with the West promised economic growth, cultural refinement, female empowerment, and perhaps even a moral renaissance.
Over time, it became clear that India had not absorbed the West’s highest values. It had latched onto the lowest. Divorce rates soared in major cities. Drinking became a sign of sophistication, while those who abstained were mocked. Promiscuity, once unthinkable, spread rapidly. Women began stepping out in short pajamas almost overnight. In a total inversion of what we once admired—refinement, self-restraint, manners—low-class behavior became aspirational.
Western feminism—once rooted in deep philosophical struggles for liberty, personhood, and dignity—was imported into India stripped of its moral foundation. It arrived as fashion, not philosophy. Empowerment was reduced to vulgarity, rebellion to posturing. Instead of cultivating strength through self-possession or inner clarity, Indian women were encouraged to mimic the most garish traits of the West’s cultural underclass: aggression without courage, sexuality without self-respect, and outrage without introspection. What should have sparked a moral awakening became a spectacle of borrowed rage, untethered from any inner struggle for truth.
Indian television began romanticizing the mythical past while promoting some of the worst modern vices—unhealthy relationships, casual sex, and substance abuse. Growing up, we were utterly unaware of drugs; now, their use is rampant. A few decades ago, Indian girls would never have used profanities. Today, vulgarity is a badge of sophistication. To appear “cool,” a girl must casually deploy the most grotesque language.
“Wokeness” has been imported wholesale into India. Those who don’t virtue-signal according to its dogmas are dismissed as backward. But virtue signaling provides the illusion of moral depth without the burden of thought. With no one to challenge it, the shallow appear enlightened, facing no cost for their hypocrisy. Even abroad, Indian women have mastered the optics of social justice, fluent in its vocabulary but detached from its roots.
In India, public performance and private conduct rarely align—a contradiction smoothed over by habitual hypocrisy. The irrational mind feels no dissonance.
The West’s values were earned through centuries of religious introspection, political struggle, and moral philosophy, driven not by convenience but by conscience—a relentless pursuit of truth. India has not Westernized—it has mimicked the West’s underclass and called it progress. Education is a badge, not discipline; ethics, mere imitation; enlightenment, a caricature absorbed without effort and wielded without understanding.
Schooled in Western phrases but untouched by Western thought, India’s elite wear borrowed language like a costume, invoking liberty, dignity, and secularism without grasping their meaning. For them, modernity is a lifestyle brand, not a moral evolution. They speak of freedom while enforcing conformity. For them, hypocrisy is not a flaw—it is the organizing principle of their lives. Institutions reward appearances over truth.
The failure of the Indian elite to develop a social and moral consciousness, and worse, that the higher they go, the more sadistic and exploitative they become, ensures that India continues to degrade.
Colonialism imposed laws, language, and institutions on India, but left its conscience untouched or hardened by resentment. Modernity became a public mask, discarded in private. True civilization demands painful inner transformation, not cosmetic change.
Real progress requires confronting the void within—a spiritual emptiness that has long been ignored. Awakening cannot come from slogans or mimicry; it must be suffered into existence.
Without a foundation in morality or reason, Indians mistook Western civilization’s fruits—prosperity, pleasure, ease—for its roots. They imported only what they recognized: the indulgences of America’s underclass. The deeper virtues—introspection, discipline, spiritual ambition—remained invisible. Western ideals were stripped of substance and repurposed to satisfy the most primitive appetites.
