Another feature that makes our commentariat comfortable with India is that Indians don’t seem to be all that mechanically facile, perhaps especially not the priestly Brahmin caste, with whom Western intellectuals primarily interact.
And the Indians tend to be more verbally agile than the Chinese and more adept at the kind of high-level abstract thinking required by modern computer science, law, and soft major academia. Thousands of years of Brahmin speculations didn’t do much for India’s prosperity, but somehow have prepared Indians to make fortunes in 21st-century America.
Reich’s DNA studies find Indians to be as wildly diverse racially as you would expect from your lying eyes. (…)
An Indian reader wrote me in 2004:
“China has an enormous advantage over India: relative homogeneity. In China there is no significant difference in racial appearance between the rich and the poor. They come from the same people. In India, you can see a colour line dividing classes every inch of the way. Sure these lines aren’t cut and dry like black and white, and there are overlaps, but the trends are easy to follow for anyone willing to observe. The fact that the Chinese don’t have 4000 year old caste hatreds gives them the advantage over India.”
