Indian Crab Syndrome

My exams are in three day's time, after which year one of college is officially at an end. I shall be staying on for summer term, so the joy of returning does not abound, not for a while anyhow.
Last month was a bit of a hard time(translate: generally a disaster) and as a result, I have to do quite well in my finals to recover my grade in a couple of my courses. I have studied quite hard, however, surprised myself at actually being able to understand things I earlier could not, and should be set for a decent set of final exams. On this topic, I shall speak no more, less I "Jinx" it.

One of my father's favourite stories, certainly one that is vivid in my memory, is a joke about Indian Crabs. My father is a well travelled person, and chooses this to illustrate a great point of difference between motherland and Foren. Here's how it goes.

There's this ship which is carrying seafood in it's cargo hold, nice expensive stuff. The captain enters the hold with one of his crewmates. Explains how this is the hold for crabs, from the world over. There's a container with crabs from Australia, and it's huge, a container with hairy chinese crabs(its a delicacy, don't ask me why, seems like the crabs got all the hair in the chinese genome), again closed, yada yada yada...you get the drift. Finally, he comes to the container with the Indian Crabs, and hot-diggity, the container's open. Crewman asks, won't the crabs escape? The captain says, take a look inside, every time one tries to climb out, three pull him back in.

It's that mentality of malaise that my father poignantly pointed out to me that we suffer from, and it's a great truth. That said, it's encouraging to see, at least in pockets and parts a climb out of this trap, where you don't let people succeed just because you're not. For every Sitaram Yechury, there's a Narayanamurthy, so to speak.

The first contrast I ever saw between these attitudes, and their results was when I switched schools back when I was a wee nipper(Sadly I still haven't grown much taller since then, and remain an averageish sort of nipper). I came from an Indian Crab School, where anyone good at anything was despised, and right from the students to the adminstration, an effort was made to ensure that everyone stayed at the same level. Sadly, no one really realised what that level would be. I wasn't really happy in that environment. When I shifted(out of much duress) to a school I had grown up hating, because of surprise surprise Indian Crab Syndrome I noticed a difference. There was an environment that actually rewarded you doing well, and had people celebrate your success. Hell, people even looked up to you sometimes!

And it makes a difference. If you're in a school/society/culture like that, you're incentivised towards working to get out of the container, and if you know that you're just going to be pulled back down, you've got to be one hell of a crab to fight your way out. How many times in your life have you had to say "Why Bother", when you know that the costs of attempting to do something pretty much outweigh any benefits. I applaud the efforts of those who did, who bypassed the system, stole from it, cheated it if they had to, because moral or immoral, that's what the situation demanded. I hope they've made steps, baby steps atleast, towards ridding ICS, because as far as sociological factors go, it's our biggest hinderance to development. People look to places like Singapore, now China, Korea, indeed America and you can see places where a winner is rewarded, not brought down. Quite often, this simple enough difference can bring about one hell of a change. You can see it in SMU, which despite has a similiar environment of competition and reward for success, sometimes scarily so.

Now, before I get teary eyed and start dreaming of a world where no one listens to Commies, and Pseudo Secularists, I'll stop. Miles to go before I sleep.