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Comment by vishnugupta | Hacker News Reader

The diversity in general in India is mind boggling which most of Indians take for granted. Be it terrain, climate, language, culture, food, etc., And all the above change noticeably every 200KM or so such that you will find more similarities between Delhi and Lahore (different countries) than Delhi and Bangalore.

It's a miracle that India manages to function as one country.

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The West expected India to be a failed state within a decade of independance. There were 584 princely states and hundreds of linguistic, religious and cultural minorities to integrate within one country.

Compare India to Yugoslavia which broke up violently along ethnic lines or to Sri Lanka which had a bloody civil war that lasted 25 years. Or the division of Pakistan into Bangladesh along racial and linguistic lines even though they shared the same religion.

What I fear is that young Indians take nation for granted and don't understand that India's secular democracy is fragile and that it can within a generation 'be broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls'.

Also mentioned in India After Gandhi.

Yup. Southern and present day Eastern Pakistan is extremely similar to northern India given how the region was artificially divided. For example, India Punjabis and Pakistani Punjabis have way more in common than say Indian Punjabis and other neighboring states like Rajasthan, Bihar, etc.

> And all the above change noticeably every 200KM

And if you are in a dense enough area, it can change every 2km, when accounting for differences in socially conditioned dialects and customs.

You mean a sparse enough area? I've generally found dense areas are more homogeneous while even neighboring villages in sparsely populated areas with bad roads and no telecommunications tend to be very different. Makes intuitive sense since transmission of culture is easier.

Not really. In dense areas, you often have far more diverse populations, as cities attrat people with different traditions and backgrounds. But in a place with as many social groups as India, these people often maintain many of their customs and habits even in the dense urban context, resulting in a great variety within a small area.

Within the same city, the Hindu majority areas will look and feel noticeably different from the Muslim majority areas. The culture, and sometimes even language, is different.

> the Hindu majority areas will look and feel noticeably different from the Muslim majority areas

Even within the Hindu majority areas, the look, feel, and even language is noticeably different between the different Hindu subgroups.

It depends on what you mean by function

I wonder why some countries (like India) have so much diversity, while others (like Russia) have so little...

Well, India has a history of for millennia, whereas Russia is way younger.

Maybe, but I think Russia got less diverse with time.

Russia does have plenty of linguistic diversity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Russia

Oh come on, how can you say that with a straight face in a thread about India? In India, 57% can speak Hindi, in Russia 99.4% can speak Russian. Less than 10% of Russians have a non Russian native language.

People in this thread say: "The diversity in general in India is mind boggling which most of Indians take for granted. Be it terrain, climate, language, culture, food, etc., And all the above change noticeably every 200KM or so"

In Russia, you can travel 2000km in any direction from the center, and see no noticeable difference in terms of people, culture, food, or language. There can a be a slight accent in some regions, but nothing as dramatic as say accents in US.

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