Murthy, Pradeep puts a lot of your issues in presepctive. While I agree, resentment and living in clutches of history is hardly productive, I disagree forgetting history and non-contextual awe of western aceheivements is beneficial to our esteem as a country. India has indegeniously developed many sciences that remain competitive even with the heavy onslaught that it faced from hundreds of years of invasion and relgious whitewash. You may alleviate your ignorance on such by studying and gaining first hand knowledge before you preach about our underahceivements.
Comparing our economic performance is not apples and apples. Much of western economic growth is tainted in slavery , imperialism and annexation. It is only less than 100 years old that these cvilizations have learnt and worked to co-exist that our civilization did a long time ago. USA's fight against race and slavery is still not very distant in history. UK's withdrawl from apartheid and imperialist regimes (SA & Hong Kong being recent examples) are still fresh in historical memories...
But I do agree with your point that we have lost our ability to innovate that our founding cultures had. We have lost our ability to heal and move on and become strong. Ashok's riducluous call is a sign of such. But I wonder sometimes why some people have a tremendous low esteem about our nation and attempt to balance it by appeasement. Let us take Narayan Murthy's blabber on the national anthem as another example of the line of thought where he was more concerned about Western presence and their appeasement when it came to a symbol of national pride that should have been non-negotiable.
