While you provided an accurate description of the Indian culture, your comment does not address the issue at hand.
The biggest problem according to me lies in the Indian culture; We don't challenge authority enough to pursue our dreams.
In Indian culture most decisions that matter are made for children by their parents. Disobeying your parents has an associated stigma to it. While this being a good thing for holding the families together, and arguably increasing happiness, this can be a deterrent to developing a person's individuality and self confidence.
So while it is difficult for well wishing parents to suggest a high-risk, high-reward path for their children (it's not their dream after all), which involves the child following a sport which he/she is good at, the children's subservience hamper independent thinking required to pursue their dream on their own. IMHO this is the primary cause of the herd mentality that we see so very often in India.
This herd mentality causes a catch22, where prior successes are required in a sport for parent-approved children's participation, and due to lack of participation there aren't any successes.
Of course there are miracles, but unfortunately not very often. For example, I attribute a lot of the participation in cricket and as a result the top class Indian cricket team that we see today, to the miracle named 'Sachin Tendulkar'[1] - one of the best batsmen that the sports has ever seen.
But with the modernization(westernization?) of the Indian culture, things are looking better. Looking at India's history at the Olympics[2], recently we have started seeing successes across a variety of sports - shooting, boxing, and badminton. I hope this trend continues and helps convince more parents to let their children pursue their dreams and not be just another rat in the rat race. And also convince a lot more children that challenging the authority can sometimes be a good thing.
The biggest problem according to me lies in the Indian culture; We don't challenge authority enough to pursue our dreams.
In Indian culture most decisions that matter are made for children by their parents. Disobeying your parents has an associated stigma to it. While this being a good thing for holding the families together, and arguably increasing happiness, this can be a deterrent to developing a person's individuality and self confidence.
So while it is difficult for well wishing parents to suggest a high-risk, high-reward path for their children (it's not their dream after all), which involves the child following a sport which he/she is good at, the children's subservience hamper independent thinking required to pursue their dream on their own. IMHO this is the primary cause of the herd mentality that we see so very often in India.
This herd mentality causes a catch22, where prior successes are required in a sport for parent-approved children's participation, and due to lack of participation there aren't any successes.
Of course there are miracles, but unfortunately not very often. For example, I attribute a lot of the participation in cricket and as a result the top class Indian cricket team that we see today, to the miracle named 'Sachin Tendulkar'[1] - one of the best batsmen that the sports has ever seen.
But with the modernization(westernization?) of the Indian culture, things are looking better. Looking at India's history at the Olympics[2], recently we have started seeing successes across a variety of sports - shooting, boxing, and badminton. I hope this trend continues and helps convince more parents to let their children pursue their dreams and not be just another rat in the rat race. And also convince a lot more children that challenging the authority can sometimes be a good thing.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sachin_Tendulkar
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India_at_the_Olympics