Culture does matter. In India, boasting about ranks/marks of one's kids is 
  pretty much a cultural thing, everyone does that, with an enormous pride. 
  This breeds a batch of kids who want marks and not the knowledge or 
  understanding of things.

Fair enough. I agree with this.

  Almost everything is a darned 1/2/5/10 marks question. Even the 
  interested ones are forced to conform and be one in the herd. 

This maybe true, but I'm also not completely convinced. I don't think we lack creativity - there are any number of stories of 'jugaad' I could bring up here to make my point. We do attempt to conform a lot though - but even the Japanese do that and they don't seem to lack any creativity.

  Indian social framework by large kills creativity and promotes rote 
  learning, and the effects thus seen are quite well known and obvious.

Perhaps, I'm misunderstanding you, but the claim that the Indian social framework kills creativity is not at all obvious to me.

My thinking is that the middle class promotes rote learning because it values education and doesn't know the difference between real understanding and rote learning.

I once heard a really well-known American professor say "most people don't like thinking" and sometimes I think is true pretty much everywhere in the world. If you look at the Americans and kind of dumb ideas a significant minority of them have about any number of issues (evolution, Islam, Obama's birth, Saddam, the Iraq War) it's quite clear they lack some basic reasoning skills.

Therefore, I suggest the following (intentionally controversial) hypothesis. Only the smartest 25% of people are actually capable of thinking. Perhaps, in the US, it turns out that this set is a superset of those employed in technology companies. In India, through an accident of economic circumstances, this is not the case. This is probably why we see so many instances of "dumb Indian software developers".