B. U. G. S.

I once pointed out to a fellow graduate student that Orientals are excellent at following up on Western technology, but not at CREATING. He went and looked up the Nobel Prizes won by Oriental countries and was honest enough to admit to me, none too happily, that every single one of them was a CONTINUATION of Western work, albeit a very productive continuation.

India is the only non-white country I know that is an exception to this rule. India regularly produces theoretical mathematicians of the type that can otherwise only be found in the West. There are still Aryans in India.

There are two ways for Aryans to become dark-skinned. The most usual method is race mixing, which is why India in general was mentioned by Adam Smith as far back as 1776 for being even more desperately poor than China.

Another method is a simple increase in melanin, which is what makes skin darker. Everybody but an albino has some melanin. If you have inadequate melatonin for the climate, you tend to die out from skin diseases and other problems.

There are still people in India who, if they wore Western clothes, would be considered typical Europeans. But there are few of them. Then there are some, which probably includes those mathematicians, who have steadily increased the melatonin in their skin from natural selection. I have seen a lot of Indians who look like Europeans who look like they have been painted.

No, I am NOT suggesting that we include India in the white race. For one thing, they would probably shoot us for it.

But I am looking to the Indian people as a surprising ally, as the article below demonstrates.

Not long ago India was the leader of the third world. Nehru made them the head of the non-aligned nations. To the small extent that we ever think of India, it is still in that context.

When it comes to the future, everybodyis focused on China.

The present situation reminds me of die Deutsche Wunder. Germany came roaring back from its total destruction in World War II and die Deutsche Wunder means “the German Miracle.” It was a huge accomplishment.

But out attention was so focused on Germany that we did not notice that Japan was moving even faster. In the 1950s I asked teh Japanese Embassy for material on their economic growth ( with the usual strange looks from my fellow students and my professors on why I would so fascinated by THAT.)

Repeatedly the Japanese Embassy books showed how Japan had just obtained a higher per capita income than MEXICO. It takes a stretch of the imagination to understand why theydid THAT.

Back then, “Asia” was a synonym for “desperate poverty.” The idea that any Asian country had become as rich as ANY country outside Asia was a major piece of news. That was back when “Made in Japan” meant “lousy.”

So while everybody is concentrating on the Yellow Peril in China, India is roaring forward. It is moving from the silly socialism it learned from the London School of Economics and Harvard into competition with the world.

To understand why Japan was important in the 1950s I had to use an elementary knowledge of arithmetic. I had to understand that Japan had to be looked at from the point of view of a geometric progression. Their economy kept DOUBLING. The average person who is obsessed with headlines wouldn’t notice a little thing like that.

India is moving fast.

China has about two hundred million more people than India has. So “China is the most populous country on earth,” as we have all heard all our lives, while India is there, too.

The difference is less than twenty percent.

Maybe, just maybe, we should ignore the headlines and pay a little attention to India.

If China is going to rule the world, which as I say I don’t think it will, it will have to roll over India first.