"Trust and honesty remain essential to Gujarati-dominated industries. Mr Mehta, himself a Jain from Palanpur, whose diamond company has a turnover of $1.8 billion and offices from Antwerp to Tokyo, says that, despite the size of the business, it is still “all based on handshakes and words, with no contracts”. "
These people have traveled from Antwerp to Tokyo for 200 years...yet Palanpur is a shithole just like every other town in India. They have seen all the benefits of a free and modern society, but have not lifted a finger to bring 1% of those ideas to the town where they live.
Surat which processes 90% of the worlds diamonds is also a shithole. Its just yet another massive Indian city with no modern infrastructure, garbage and sewers everywhere, and had a plague outbreak about a decade ago!
While these globe trotters make millions which they stash, how much money do you think the rank and file of diamond polishers make? Do they have adequate health benefits and protection against problems like this: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16201206
“We don’t have to deal with government too much, and mostly not with the banks, as most money comes from families,” says Dinesh Navadiya, the head of the Surat Diamond Association. “So there is little scope for corruption.”
No corruption...except massive tax avoidance. It is impossible to run the smallest business in India without running into corruption.
Some might argue these people have no obligation to improve society and that's Ok. But any article writing about the pros, should also write about the cons.
Another article along a similar vein: http://qz.com/459422/how-indian-families-took-over-the-antwe...
Its disgusting to hear all these people come for is business opportunities, refusing to speak the local language, adopt local customs, assimilate, or give back to the community at large, while the host society sees jobs shipped to India and tax revenues decline.
Excerpt: What it takes A far more encouraging example can be found farther up the coast. Surat, a city in Gujarat of 4.5m people, is a flourishing trading hub that not long ago was a wretched dump like Gorakhpur. In 1994, after a reported (but never confirmed) outbreak of pneumonic plague, it became famous for squalor, gridlock, slums and rotten management. Since then it has been transformed. Effective managers cleaned up. Rubbish was collected and transport improved, streets were swept and public services delivered. Miraculously, the improvements were sustained. Some 96% of residents pay their municipal taxes on time. Manoj Kumar Das, who now runs the city, says that over the past decade the growth in Surat’s population averaged 5% a year, among the fastest of any city in the world. According to his planners, by 2031 it could have 9.3m people, overtaking London.
You complain about "positive generalizations" and yet you resort to generalizations yourself without checking facts ?
As for Palanpur - I don't know much - but fund this: http://www.tripadvisor.com/Hotel_Review-g1156005-d302375-Rev....
Theres still so much backwards cultural stigma thats prevalent in India that I think its just going to take a lot of time for Indians to realize what needs to be done.
We know that this is not permitted if we are attributing negative qualities to a group of people. Why is it then permissible to generalize when we are praising the same groups? In doing so the author is sort of admitting that it is at times logical to generalize groups of people and that there is no risk of prejudice in doing so.
Growing up in India, I was told that owning your business was the only path to success. In 1990, my dad borrowed a ZX Spectrum from a friend so I could play video games and he was genuinely confused when he found out that I spent all day typing (I was learning BASIC) instead of beating his hi-score in Jetpac. Thankfully, as I learned programming, I got a tremendous amount of support from his Gujarati friends, all of whom wanted me to write DBase III+ / FoxPro software for their businesses. But whenever I came up with non-business ideas, my people just didn't get it. I don't think anyone outright discouraged me when I wanted to write software for fun but they just didn't understand why I would write freeware when I could easily sell it. Half of my years between 15-20 were spent being lectured by successful businessmen on why/how I should market my music player or transliteration software.
This article resonated with me because I finally get just how ingrained business is to my culture. I always knew I was the odd one out and came to terms with that a decade ago but now I realize how others in my community must think of me. Time and again I have chosen to not make money even after I made a finished product. For me, once the product is built, I completely lose interest and want to make something else. For them, I already did the hard part of making the product and am bailing out at the fun part of making money from it.
To any Gujaratis reading this who love hacking for the sake of hacking, I'd say there are dozens of us! Let's keep talking business with family and friends of family during the day and quietly watch Numberphile after everyone is asleep.
Actually both should be permissible, as both can be true in the statistical and cultural sense.
We're not unique snowflakes as we like to believe. Our culture shapes us in many ways, nicely in some ways, badly in others, and it does the same to others sharing it.
There's a reason why stereotypes exist, beside bigotry and arbitrariness.
If this article was about whites or about Christians, it would not have a laudatory tone. Instead, the author would be writing about how the "old boys network" keeps others out of lucrative businesses, about how there's no diversity in the top rungs of these companies, and about how "handshakes" are circumventing government laws and taxation. But that is exactly what the Gujarati network is all about. Yes, it is a hardworking group, but also very in-group oriented, and yes, racist.
This article seems more like PR but isn't far from truth. I think, as a community, Jews have probably outdone any one community out there.
In fact, a great many jewish business families in British-India adopted Gujarat, and spoke Gujarati.
Here's another biased take on the topic by a Pakistani journalist:
http://www.livemint.com/Opinion/WaBCEddMLH5DaM0aD5wzbN/Why-I...
And here my answer on Quora on a related question: https://www.quora.com/Why-do-Gujarati-people-make-up-a-large...
Finding moral fault in others is often just a way to explain their own lack of accomplishment.
Not always, of course. But something to be very careful of.
The author made it sound like every and each Gujarati person is destined to entrepreneurial success and failing and losing are unexpected outcomes in their cases.
Nothing against Gujaratis or Indians in general. I really like entrepreneurial and trailblazing people provided they earned their wealth through legitimate means not questionable or unethical ones but I preferred to read a more impartial analysis or critique of this anthropological topic than this nauseating self-congratulatory Economist article.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patidar_reservation_agitation
So... Gujaratis have an ethic of capitalistic success. Are you also comfortable saying Blacks have an ethic of failure, Jews have an ethic of in-group morality, Gypsies have an ethic of stealing, and so on? If you are not, then you are arbitrarily imposing a limit that qualities assigned to a group must only be good. If you are, congratulations! You are now racist.
The article merely documents the entrepreneurial genius of the Gujarati community which is worth lauding. Gujarati is not a race.
