The Global South is culturally ahead of Europe.

Being a PhD student, I'm never going to skip an event where there might be free food and an excuse to be away from the office. This time it was for India Day, organized by my institution and the Embassy of India in Poland. My aim was to snoop around and maybe snatch some new recipes from other Indian students so that I could try cooking them myself at home. The whole thing immediately turned out to be some sort of “promoting tourism” kinda thing, with way too many short videos about Indian luxury, monuments, yoga and other tacky things to get a wealthy European's attention. Definitely out of a PhD student's pockets, you know.

Fast forward to the chat with a group of students in front of a warm cup of masala tea. Despite the lack of booze, I went fully political and started telling them that in some aspects, India is culturally more advanced than Europe.

At first they were baffled, and they guessed that I was saying so because of their long history and religions and traditions; but I really meant that they've been experiencing collapse for much longer and with much stronger intensity than most European countries. Sure, Eastern Europeans have had such a shock when the Soviet Union fell apart, but it could never compare to the tragedies unleashed by the British Empire in India.

So I tried to make the example of the current Mediterranean drought: being Italian, I've spoken with many fellow countrymen and I have only seen three types of answers concerning the topic of water:

As soon as I finished saying this, this Indian girl immediately sprung up: “So why don't people get together and do their own alternate thing?”

She nailed it, right on the head.

She had it in her, instinctively, a purely cultural response that I couldn't have gotten from any Italian or Polish or European person that isn't already radically committed to the climate cause.

This mindset, this cultural trait that Europeans sorely lack, Indians have it in troves. They know what it means to be knee-deep in a crisis and having no one of the powers-that-be listen or care about you, and they've known that for centuries. Through such strife, they developed this skill at a local level: a collective bottom-up power to directly deal with the problem at hand. In Europe, we either forgot how to do it or don't have it at all. We're running around with out mouths full of electric cars and green technologies, but the real cultural advancement is somewhere else entirely.

By now you should've realized that it is not progress; it's an illusion of progress that our western brains will never spontaneously abandon, because it would mean admitting that a “poorer country” is “better than us” at something. It would mean giving up the self-assigned role of “cultural elites” that the US and Europe have always pretended they had.

But without listening to the Global South, without learning this same skill honed through decades of struggles, we won't get out of the climate crisis. No matter how many more money we think we can throw at it compared to other countries.

Eventually I went home with no recipes for my kitchen, but a damn good one for our future.