The main advantage of India for me personally is a sense of community that I felt when I went back there after 8 years. Everyone in the society (i.e: I'd say equivalent to a street or a suburb) knows you and greets you. You go to the temple in the morning, and pickup some snacks along the way. In the evening, people go out to eat, meet their relatives, etc.
There are pros and cons of this sense of community as well, people can be nosy. However, coming back from India recently, I felt pretty depressed and alone. In North America, everyone seems like a busy worker bee that is working all the time. On the weekend, the bees explore a little bit more. Go hiking, or explore their other hobbies. But the sense of aloneness is something I never knew I had until I went back to India.
Aside: This was my first trip back after having done a few when I was young and hating those since I was just stuck in the house as a YA and had limited internet access. The country, the people, have come far from that and as an adult I have all the freedom to do whatever the fk I want too.
> But the sense of aloneness is something I never knew I had until I went back to India.
I only lived in Bangladesh until age 5, and have spent nearly my whole life in America, but this sense of loneliness hit me really hard when I had my own kids. I remember being surrounded by aunties and cousins at their age, and my kids aren’t. Just in the last year we had a critical mass of neighborhood kids move in, but for my oldest, it was a very solitary childhood until age 8 or so.
Good that you like this but I honestly don’t like that. This is just a bunch of people saying hello. They’re no more helpful in the case of urgency than the average American you don’t know the name of. Thus what remains is only pervasive gossip. When people do unfathomable things like forcing marriages within caste this community “camaraderie” is what they use as the reason: “what will SOCIETY think of us?” You mean the jobless woman three doors down? I’d much rather live where no one knows or judges with prejudice my life choices.
This doesn’t just happen in india but also in the states where there are “tight knit communities”. Aka small church focused towns. Jobless people knowing each other seems like one of the fundamental problems hindering human freedom to me.
That's fair. So the whole people greeting you and saying hello, sounds a bit more like an overstatement. Here, I was speaking more to the fact that you can have a better social life there in general. Most NRI (non-residential Indians) that were born in India, will have a larger extended family back home. This brings a lot more family events, gatherings, and I am sure, drama; something you can maneuver around I think.
The whole what will SOCIETY think of us, I think it really varies depending on what parts of India you are in. At least in India, cultures vary greatly even from city to city. I have heard very very progressive things happening in India, and also very regressive things. It just depends on where you are and how much f*ks you give personally. Who cares what a lady three doors down thinks? Let them think what they want.
I definitely see your side of this though, as that was my perspective before. Mine is a bit different at the moment, but might change in the future.
I think this is the biggest difference - economic differences are quite large in nominal terms but life always goes on, there's going to be food on the table and roof over your head.
Coming from East Asia a lot of my friends are not used to this - but I find myself enjoying the loneliness of it all - being on a boat in the middle of the lake at the middle of the night with no one around you in 2 miles radius is a blessing.
For a similar reason, I never liked New York, SF or LA in the US.
There are pros and cons of this sense of community as well, people can be nosy. However, coming back from India recently, I felt pretty depressed and alone. In North America, everyone seems like a busy worker bee that is working all the time. On the weekend, the bees explore a little bit more. Go hiking, or explore their other hobbies. But the sense of aloneness is something I never knew I had until I went back to India.
Aside: This was my first trip back after having done a few when I was young and hating those since I was just stuck in the house as a YA and had limited internet access. The country, the people, have come far from that and as an adult I have all the freedom to do whatever the fk I want too.