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Comment by paraschopra | Hacker News Reader

Author has a very laser-focused view of India. The country is much more diverse that this article supposes. There is still extreme poverty, religious bigotry, no-holds barred traffic lawlessness, corruption, discreet money and hundreds of other very-Indian issues.

Americanization of India is limited to metros and big cities, and there too you see a mind-boggling mix of poverty and abundance.

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I think you are missing the author's point.

Yes there is still poverty,religious stupidity,corruption etc etc.

But at least the minds of the bravest and the brightest are now filled with thoughts about entrepreneurship,technology and change.(which the author claims are american values)

Think about what the predominant themes on Indian minds were a few decades earlier.

"There is still extreme poverty, religious bigotry, no-holds barred traffic lawlessness, corruption, discreet money and hundreds of other very-Indian issues."

So does America. The point of the article is that there are some very uniquely American things - consumerism, fast-food, Starbucks, etc. - that have infiltrated Indian culture. I interpreted it as an observation independent of a value judgment.

I think what paraschopra is commenting on is that India has certainly not become the USA. It has a passing resemblance in some places if you limit your vision to 5 degrees in front of you, and small sections of the richest parts of India are getting slowly westernized. But India as a whole, the 2nd most populous country in the world, has certainly not become the USA.

But the NYT isn't going to make money with a headline like India still getting slowly westernized in rich areas

I agree that India is not simply becoming like the US. And I would hope that it wouldn't -- among the many reasons are that we've got lots of problems in the US, including social dislocation and isolation, high rates of divorce and so on.

Those issues will always exist everywhere. The key is that in India, they are orders of magnitude worse.

It's got many, many more people. I'm sure I would be boggled by the logistical problems simply of running the public transportation system in a large city. It's not easy to do things at large scale, as we've learned with Web development.

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