Re: Why did India fall behind West

So I got a response to this which said "Industrial Revolution". The main question is what made Industrial Revolution happen in the West before it did in India even though India was not far behind in terms of technology (Tipu Sultan's army invented rockets).

Well to me the main point of inflection was invention of the Printing Press which enabled thoughts, ideas and learnings to be duplicated and replicated far and wide whereas in India learning and knowledge passing was oral. This meant that in India one had to be close to a learned person to be able to develop intellect. Moreover because things were not written down or recorded, they kept getting lost throughout. Human mind does have its limitations.

In the West one the printing press got developed and replication of knowledge became easy, that would have spawned creating people far and wide to build on the available knowledge. There are intelligent, creative and hard-working people everywhere.

The internet is doing the same now and that is enabling India to start catching up.

Thats my thought. Ideas / comments?