South Asia Part 2

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]obviously hinduism and islam dominate the religions of the area hinduism the uh 97 percent of the world's hindus live in india and it doesn't mean 97 of the people in india are hindu it's just that that's where the hindus are concentrated um there's a couple reasons for it i'll get to that in a second the religion is polytheistic multiple catholic multiple gods and much of the religious practice is tied to your caste which we'll talk about later kind of your position in society and as it relates to what you do in society and with hinduism there's you're all over the charts as far as how somebody prays when you pray what type of religious activities you do so there's not one single way to be a hindu there's multiple ways and contrast that with islam where it's very very rigid the third religion we see in the area there's an interesting one buddhism this came out of the hinduism that existed in around 563 bc this is the hinduism then is different a little bit than what we see now um but the buddha is buddha is a title i don't think his friends called him bud they called him sid it's kind of a lifestyle that can be superimposed on other religions so often you'll find people that are buddhist and shintous buddhist and taoist it was adopted by a chinese ruler and it kind of migrated to the north in through nepal and bhutan and into china so it's in the northern area of what we're talking about now and we'll see it again when we talk about china and before noble truths you don't have to memorize these but the idea if you look at these that they're not something that is directly religious um i had a book once which i totally disagree with because there are other elements of buddhism that that are religious that they were trying to say that it's more it's not really a religion it's a philosophy and because of this you can superimpose it and get it to merge with other religions um i have friends i grew up with and i've known forever that were christian buddhists and it was always interesting conversations around their house how that worked i always think my ex-wife needed to be a buddhist because she always wanted stuff so this is if you if you're no longer wanting things then you will no longer suffer some of the prayers of some of the religious practices revolve around virtual cleansing in the ganges river which scares the hell out of me simply because that river is so polluted and here we can see the variation in the religious practices with predominantly hinduism the yellow is islam is islam and then you've got the buddhism superimposed in through here and then even with you've got your trifecta of confucianism taoism buddhism through here it's always fascinating to me that just how different islam and hinduism is you know obviously the most basic one remember the emphasis that there's but one god allah in islam and then you've got hinduism like spirit we've got hundreds of gods we've got lots of idols we've got lots of secret writings we can do it all sorts of different ways and then you've got the uniform dogma within islam the only thing i could find is that neither one will eat pork but it's very very different in between those two religions what happens though is in areas where you have a city that has a strong muslim population and a strong hindu population it's not that they fight it's just that they kind of interact in different circles so the businesses they work with the people they live near so you've got like a muslim area and a hindu area and they just kind of coexist in the city now india and pakistan have long fought over different issues one of which is the water that's important during the dry season in the indus river valley but most of the conflict relates to the kashmir region kashmir in jammu this area when the vote came to be who would be part of in india who would be part of pakistan by the way i'm very much summarizing and abbreviating this um like i said before most of the area voted every area but this area voted that if it was muslim majority pakistan if it was hindu madari india except for this one this one was a muslim majority area with a hindu leader and so they went with india and pakistan disputes that well one of the reasons they went with india is it's an old silk route so the trade between europe and the trade between asia also was a trade between south asia as well well the route to get into the indian subcontinent went through this area and so this part of india which is the kashmir region had a lot of ties to the rest of india and so that was kind of the background for that they've disputed it they've gone to they've had some conflicts over it um armed conflicts it kind of waxes and wanes with the leadership between the two countries whether or not it becomes violent or not um they do have a very ritualized opening and closing of the border between the two countries i totally insist that you guys watch it it's fascinating um because you see kind of the the indian subcontinent virgins of machismo of who's more powerful who's more mean [Music] and becomes so ritualized now it's become a spectacle that everybody comes to see it's it's comedic yet at the same time there's lots of political implications going on one of the new twists i don't think it's in this particular video that i posted in canvas is that india is using female guards which would never happen in the male military dominated pakistan army india world's largest democracy this is a huge democracy this is important because because things happen to benefit the greater society in india they really are trying to improve their economic conditions they're really trying to address poverty democracy is a slow process we'll see things happen really quickly in china and really slowly in india i already mentioned the population growth issues i already mentioned they have a diverse economy just re-emphasizing that um one of the things i like about india is they have a strong english-speaking population they're in a former english colony so a lot of jobs get outsourced to india because really cheap labor and their english-speaking population is doing well they've actually have lots of schools to teach people how to speak like an american so people don't realize when they're talking to customer support or tech support that they're talking to india because the person will will use american slang and they're actually getting much better at it than they had in the past i had one that was tech support for my dell and i'm talking person and like they had a weird accent i couldn't place it because they use terms like y'all and um contractions that you don't usually hear in formal english and so i finally when the call was over like do you mind me asking where you're calling from and the woman starts laughing she goes well i'm calling from india but i went to school in texas i just thought that was funny um the a lot of the growth in outsourcing to india happened 20 years ago 25 years ago when they realized that the computer programs they'd written only had two slots for the year so instead of it saying 1990 in the computer program it would just say 90.

[00:08:07]well once we're gonna get to the year 2000 the fear was that all the computer programs would look at it and say oh my god it's the year 1900 instead of the year 2000 because it was just gonna have zero zero so it was this y2k bug and tons of programs had to be rewritten quickly and fix this problem so india kind of stepped up and did a lot of the reprogramming during that so nowadays if you've got computer programming you can just outsource to india it's like i need this done you could you can have it set up very very quickly my father-in-law's business they do that it's an insurance company and they have they got rid of most of their staff and kept a handful of key programmers simply because it was so much cheaper to send it off to india the caste system in india is complicated to say the least um i can't do it justice in a few seconds but i'll try and just summarize it it's a social structure where it's kind of what your position and what you do in life where you've got the lower class laborers the lower castes sorry laborers and you've got merchants who are higher caste and you've got warriors and rulers your your political leadership at a cast and then you've got your religious at the very top of the caste system you're born into it if your father was a merchant you will be a merchant um if you're going to marry you will marry within that same cast as well you live amongst that cast so it's not something that's fluid and mobile your religious practices and hinduism is tied to your caste and so everybody within your caste shares the same practices if you're a farming cast but maybe it's tied to the celebrations of the harvest so it's it's part of who you are and your position in life the top being the brahman the religious caste and the bottom they're actually technically not even in the caste system they're below the caste system um the common term used by the west is the untouchables but they're the dollars these are the ones that would be working with waste removal of dead bodies that kind of stuff um very very very poor and it's kind of into the culture where you've got a lower caste class citizen now some of the rules about how the untouchables could be treated have been changed and they're providing education to them but it's it's if you've got a system where you've got an inherently underclass of population they're still the poorest group of all of these i mean this is a dollar neighborhood for you now the cast system is breaking down in the cities simply because we don't have an automobile manufacturing cast we don't have a cafeteria cast and if everybody has to work together you know you can't have a managerial cast managers are incompetent capitalism doesn't like that so it's broken down a lot in the cities but what we find is that for the most part these guys are all have three different jobs they're all in the same cast but they all still hang out together they're more than likely going to marry within their cast still so it's got the social remnants of it but economically it's disappearing in the big cities i've had two students who migrated from india in recent years one came from a very very rural area and the caste system was very much in place there and the other one when i asked them about their caste system and they were from calcutta they just kind of laughed at me and said no we you know my my parents are cast my girlfriend's from the same cast but that's about it for anything related to the cast nobody really cares anymore but that was in the city versus the rural areas pakistan this is democratic now they've gone through a military coup for a while they actually had a female leader for a while benazir bhutto the united states has become friendly with pakistan for a couple of reasons one this is where we've got some of those um fundamentalist terrorist training camps are in through here and so that is a threat and so we're trying to work with pakistan to get rid of them also that ongoing war in afghanistan this becomes a staging area and a way to get into pakistan so the united states has been trying to be friendly with them and we want to build a pipeline to get through afghanistan and through pakistan to access that central asian oil um sorry i'm laughing um cricket always makes me laugh because it's the craziest sport where it goes for two days they have tea breaks they score of 150 to 17 is considered close and i've tried to watch it a million times i just can't figure it out but if somebody wants to find a way to make cricket interesting for me send me the link and i'll i'd be more than happy to figure it out english remember they got their independence in 1971 they were of the three countries they were the one that had the least economic development so it's not surprising that poverty is rampant through here the other problem with with bangladesh is this area down and through here is a giant river delta so when the ganges floods it floods the river delta so this is a constant problem they had a hurricane that hit a couple years ago that came across this very low-lying area and it killed tens of thousands of people because it is in such a physically precarious area but on the right side this is one of the governments that said we will have these positions in our government for women this is a basically twice the rate it is in the united states for our federal government of the number of women in elected positions there's a ganges uh this this picture when we talk about climate change this one's the one that always scares me because a few feet change in sea level is going to displace tens of millions of bangladeshis those tens of millions of bangladeshis are going to go and spill over into india this is where i think we're going to see the first global problem of climate change on a massive scale because those tens of millions of people going into india could disrupt the world's largest democracy you know we had a million migrants come from the middle east and into europe in the past couple of years and look what it's done to the europeans they're all freaking out they're turnovering governments and europe's one of the richest areas on earth and they couldn't handle the impact of 1 million i can't imagine what tens of millions going into india would do and to destabilize that government but hopefully we'll see now what do you do for iron when you're a poor country and iron is needed for construction so you just buy use ships you break them apart melt the metal and there you go that's your source it's called ship breaking so all the old ships that are no longer in service no longer efficient they're too expensive to retrofit the companies in india and bangladesh will buy them tear them apart and recycle just about everything they can now remember they don't have the same labor laws we do they don't have the same safety so it's frightening what happens in these areas where they tear apart the ships uh here you can see this is a recent picture of chittagong and all the ships that are being dismantled here in the water this one it's not a great photo but there's oil leaks so all i mean this there's oil leaks there's fuel leaks there's asbestos it's frightening um i have a ship breaking video on canvas i encourage you to watch it it's kind of scary what happens at these places but this is what do you do i mean if if they didn't have this well they couldn't afford to get oil um iron on the open market any other way i'm not get that chance for blanca it it's i left this in here just as one of those stories were that i talked about for years the ongoing conflict the similes and tummles similes and pommels it's just nice not fighting anymore it was that typical you had a smaller group that wanted equal rights and they fought for it in god over time the tsunami in 2004 hit this area pretty hard and this was when we knew that the civil war was almost over because both sides agreed to peace to stop fighting until they could get everything rebuilt and they could work together to help those that were affected by the tsunami and when we talk about indonesia we'll see another group that's rebelling against the government i didn't do that and so that was not a good time for the fact that they were going to put down their arms to help rebuild i thought that was a good sign in 2004 and sure enough it led to their peace our last two countries in south asia nepal and bhutan um they're kind of fun nepal had a long civil war um model unrest it's it's the reason we anybody hears about nepal anymore is simply because this is how you access the um climbing in the himalayas china has kind of limited it and the everybody goes to nepal it's just beautiful and no i don't even think i'm gonna put nepal on the quiz and there's dr saludin a bhutan fascinates me there's king wang chuck he's no longer the king but his king wang chuck and his four queens everybody wang chuck tonight yeah this is a buddhist country with a very strong central government unitary remembrance said that we talked about russia in the united states that there's a federal system where you've got lots of powers allocated allocated locally and a unitary system where the power is in one place and here it ships it sits with the king he actually wanted the population to decide if he should be king so they had an election in 2008 that said should i be the king anymore and the population overwhelmingly said yes you should be and the person who was running against them didn't even want to run because they didn't want him to not be king it's not that they were afraid of him it's just that's the society is geared towards it now he stepped down and his son took over um i can't pronounce his name but he's now the new king they had um a recognition of you know what we don't have a lot of economic development we don't have a lot of exports if you look at any economic charts bhutan always ranks really really low but lutan was like well that doesn't that's not how you should measure us that's not how you should measure our society are the people happy so the concept of gross national happiness kind of came out of bhutan and there are groups that have measures that's not uniform but the gross national happiness i thought well that's a nice way to look at a society it's not how rich how poor they are it's you know how happy is the population and apparently they're not unhappy they don't can't get tobacco there all right see you guys later good night from south india next time we'll see you in southeast asia