India is currently ruled by a conservative-nationalist party (indulging in both Trickle Down Economics and mass-scale welfare) that represents the largest block of idol-worshiping pagans on Earth, is opposing China while being circumspect about Russia, and is gaining relevance in international arena just as Europe is losing it. Oh, and Indian are brown-skinned.

This combination of attributes means that India can be seen as rival/adversary/enemy/evil by pretty much all socio-political circles in the West. Expect to see many such articles, trying to box it in an agenda-driven box.

Good thing that Indian officials have decades of experience with threading the needle – non-alignment and all that – or it would be in a real trouble.

> idol-worshiping pagans

That came out.. wrong?

Why? In the view of the descendants of Mediterranean civilisations — "the West" (Christendom) and West Asia/North Africa (Ummah), Hindus are the last remaining large group of pagans, and idol-worshippers to boot. Everyone else like them has been "saved" by hook or crook, stick or carrot.

Am I wrong?

The term "pagan" historically referred to individuals who practiced polytheistic religions outside of the major world religions and Hindus worship Brahman ultimately. Also the "idols" are not seen as the deity but a physical representation that helps worshiping the deity.

But I'd love to be corrected as my knowledge is very superficial.

> The term "pagan" historically referred to individuals who practiced polytheistic religions outside of the major world religions

Not really, all nature worshippers have been called pagans by followers of Abrahamic religions. "Major/minor" is a modern concept, the original idea was of true believer and heathen – Religion was never a democracy

> Hindus worship Brahman ultimately. Also the "idols" are not seen as the deity but a physical representation that helps worshiping the deity.

Talk to 10 Hindus and you will get 20 definitions of Hinduism. Not surprising, when considering its 4000 year old roots and its practice in an ultra-diverse society.

>Hindus worship Brahman As a Hindu, some people see this as the ultimate truth, while quite a lot of others don't. There are a lot of paths to salvation, depends on whom you ask.

* * *

I knew that I didn't know too much, now thanks to your comment, I'm searching for books about Hinduism and its history. Very interesting!

Thank you very much for the detailed answer!!

Not disagreeing per se, but I find it interesting to regard Hinduism as anything other than a major world religion.

I don't know about the rest, but you're wrong in the assumption that religion today has any relevance in how someone is perceived in the west.

Well, except for islam.

It does for evangelical christians, who form a large voter base and wield lots of political power.

I don't think even to them this stands out more than India having an order of magnitude lower GDP per capita than western countries.

Evangelical Christians dislike anyone who are unlike them in any way. This isn't some sort of special targeting against Indians.

Nativity scenes, as well as the countless number of icons and statues seen in Catholicism and Orthodoxy, would count as a form of idol worship under strict interpretation of Abrahamic religious texts too. So yes, you are wrong.

I think the parent commenter was trying to portray Indians from a Western perspective, to highlight the disdain that the West has supposedly held for India.

They're not wrong, by the way; Nixon was reportedly vitriolic in his racism against Indians[1].

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/03/opinion/nixon-racism-indi...

India bashing is in vogue with all the Left Leaning Publications.

Racism that can't be called Racism because it's done by American Left.

Don't take it seriously. These Leftist Papers like NYC, WaPo, New Yorker are Uncle Soros Toilet Paper. Nothing more.

We've banned this account for using HN for ideological and nationalistic flamewar. That's not allowed here, regardless of which party or ideology or nation you're battling for or against. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

India already have the reputation for their "IT support departments" calling everyone in the world every few months to try to gain access to their computer, also known as social engineering, a form of hacking. Many of their operation centers have been exposed, yet the Indian government has not been able to stop it. China also has 1.4 billion people, and they indeed are more known than India for being a serious black hat threat. But if you ask the average person what kind of hacker they are more familiar with, they will probably recall the 10+ times they were personally called by a hacker with a strong Indian accent.

India has ~150 million English speakers, while China has ~10 million.

All chinese people speak English. They just pretend not to sometimes to mess with you.

What is your claim based on?

It was a joke.

It’s worrisome that many companies out source their IT there …

That's slowing down; Mexico City and the Philippines are becoming more popular.

PI because of long standing ties to the US and Canada, and eligbility for things like TFW workers in Canada. Mexico City for timezones and NAFTA TN visas.

> That's slowing down;

That's not what the IT export numbers say.

I always thought they were scammers, never have I heard them to refer to as hackers except in this thread.

Social engineering counts as hacking, even if it doesn't require much specialized technical finesse.

You can be both

The reputation you describe is non existant in my (non-English-speaking) country. I guess US and UK are just the easiest and richest targets for Indian hackers. Why should we expect something else ?

It's the language barrier. Germany is targeted by Turks and Eastern Europeans in similar fashion.

I think you severely overestimate German speakership in Turkey.

I think the point was more that there are fewer German speakers in India than English speakers, by a large margin, so if you are going to scam in German you might be more likely to source your call-centre operatives from elsewhere, which is why Indian call centres don't have the reputation in that country which they do in the UK & US.

Some of them might be former residents of Germany. Most of my spam calls came from Tunisia, Morocco, Turkey or Bulgaria, most of the spoken German was pretty decent. Good old times when I had time for scambaiting.

Good thing that this only affects English speaking countries.

It made me really allergic for the word kindly combine with Sir

Sir , kindly xxxxxx = Indian scammer

The fact that general English language proficiency is far greater in India (where English is an official language) than China ... may have something to do with this.

Boiler-room telephony operations tend to follow linguistic capabilities. The Philippines is another locale with widespread English-language capabilities and a low prevailing wage rate, though it seems less associated with technical scams than India is.