Ooh, no comments, I'll bite. The last time I said something negative about Indian society I had my personal details thrown all over HN. Wonder what's going to happen this time.

So here's the thing. This article is pretty spot on. We, the privileged of India, do indeed feel entitled. There's absolutely no doubt about that.

My theory is that the population pressure in India is so very high that you're always fighting for your piece of the pie and over extending yourself (such as the man with the large house who took over the pavement). Yes, it's greedy, but it's a particular mentality that comes out of being part of this massive rat race with millions.. billions.. of competitors. I have several friends in India who I would call upper class. You know, rich people with 4 bedroom apartments on the 17th floor in and around the capital.

You know what these people call themselves ?

Middle class.

They refuse to acknowledge that they are wealthy. That they are privileged. That they are truly upper class. I have a friend who drives an Audi presented to him by his father who thinks he's middle class.

These people struggle (or think that they do..) for so long in the rat race that they forget that they have risen above it and gone far beyond that. Perhaps that is why they seem to lack compassion and empathy. Maybe they feel that they are still struggling to survive and therefore can't spare a moment for someone else ?

The rich do need to take a moment to feel rich and then feel responsible. Unfortunately, as the article mentions the rich in India - to a great extent - are failing at this. Maybe it's desensitization due to the immensely large number of poor people. Maybe it's something else - further study is required.

Of course, I'm not even going into how hierarchical and class oriented Indian society truly is. Most people who the 'middle class' perceive as lower class are almost sub humans in their eyes. This is another reason in my opinion the Delhi gang rape case was such a big deal. The middle class got to point fingers once more at the lower classes who 'rape us'. They got to ask the government what they are doing to protect them from these 'evil immigrants who come into New Delhi and ruin our fair city'. I've had statements from rich girls in New Delhi who don't like 'these poor people who stare at us', but are completely fine with spoilt rich brats driving circles around them while honking away.

On the flip side though, this article mostly covers behavior in New Delhi. I'll go as far as to say that New Delhi is possibly the most horrible city in India when it comes to these things. Other cities tend to be more relaxed. There are far far better places than New Delhi.

The class system in Delhi is enforced and reinforced by the rich and poor collectively. I had a reservation at the Hilton for one night two years ago and I arrived on a friend's motorbike. The security at the hotel wouldn't let me through because I didn't look 'rich enough'. The security at the hotel by this logic, wouldn't let in people who looked like themselves either.

Situation's complicated.

EDIT:

There are a lot of replies to this post comparing the mentality I've mentioned above to that which exists in the west. I can see where that is coming from, but the main factor that needs to be taken into account is the kind and scale of poverty that exists in India. In India we say that if you have two meals a day, and a roof over your head, you're already rich!

Consider that, some posts here say that SV millionaires do not consider themselves upper class. That would be absolutely ridiculous in India! But, there are people here who go by the same ideals.

It's VERY EASY in India to make a difference in someone's life. Even if you're middle class, you can make a difference because people around you are way poorer than you. The problem is one of large scale apathy and complete indifference.

As an example, being middle class in the west, it's impossible to think that you could change someone's life by just hiring them to work in your house - by giving them reasonable pay and good working conditions. In India this is quite possible, a middle class person could easily hire 3-4 people and therefore start to create change. Maybe not the best example of how you can make a difference but the article is about how the privileged in India should feel more responsible and try harder to make a difference. For example, if you do hire people to work in your house, make sure that you encourage them to educate their children ? (stuff like that helps us move forward with these problems..)

My point is, being privileged in India is not really like being privileged in the west. You may not have government and industry connections but you can still make a massive difference at a personal level and if enough people start doing that, there will be a change. It's probably our only shot at it.

I work in this space. I think it is worth noting that, yes this is true for some players, particularly at middle management and executive levels. However it is equally work noting that some of the resistance is just conservative engineering.

Would you just grab the latest 0.1 release of the hot new database and throw it up on your production systems because everyone keeps talking about the promise of it? This is a real concern at the engineering levels.

One of the problems with distributed generation is not that it eats away at grid profits - there is still profit from maintaining the grid that allows you to have power even if your solar panels break. There are price structures that allow this to be profitable for utilities (however everyone involved needs to look at it with fresh eyes -- homeowners need to stop thinking about it in just profit from unused kwh and utilities need to stop looking at it in terms of kwh pushed). The problem is that huge and expensive amounts of infrastructure are designed an manufactured with a one-way power flow in mind. Protection schemes are predicated on a star(ish) topology of distribution lines, where the assumption that power flows from the "hub" out.[1] Things like transformers are highly tuned for this type of flow, to the point where even small changes or running out of spec can seriously degrade the expected lifetime (usually thought out and planned on the time-frame of 30 years.) Power flowing the other way is a "break the line" event, period, to protect that equipment. A lot of substations don't have the type of capacity or equipment to handle power swings too far out of spec, because they designed that way for maximum efficience of the push model.

Something this article misses in it's analysis, is that power companies building infrastructure is absurdly expensive - getting right aways for power lines is a decade long, legally perilous, and highly prone to regulatory whim, endeavor (the NIMBY crowd is strong here). As such, once one is put in, the cost is amortized over 30+ year timelines, and efficient operation is actually strongly considered. Demand response and efficient appliances are actually in the interest of utilities, and they do recognize this. If they can't build new infrastructure to increase supply, they want demand to remain within their capability to deliver (and when done right, the base "connected" fee to the customers can be as or more profitable than more power to fewer customers).

Finally, all the understanding and models of how electricity works in an interconnected grid is based on models assuming "roughly" steady state capable generators. Things like solar and wind have some problems in this, as they can contribute instability to the overall system - if the wind dies, you have to have hot standby power to keep voltage levels up. If everyone in a region has PV, and clouds move in, they will be demanding more power from the grid. On a "partly sunny" day, this result in weird spikes, again placing strange wear patterns on transformers and generators that are ramping up and down in response.

Even the engineers I know who are all about this stuff are hesitant to just deploying it, because of all this technical challenge. Just like I would be hesitant to throw an unknown datastore into a stable working system without staging, testing, and otherwise slowly integrating it. It's even worse for the utilities, because they are in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" position. What is worse - rolling slowly with the new technology and being blasted as obstructionists, or going head first, and being blasted when the unexpected happens and breaks a bunch of things, or finding a middle ground and making everyone unhappy?

[1] at transmission levels, this isn't true, and in dense urban centers the topology is meshier, but this statement is still true for a (geographically anyway) majority of power distribution.

I'm not sure what connotations you were going for with the word "hospice", but I'd really suggest choosing a different name.