> These people struggle (or think that they do..) for so long in the rat race that they forget that they have risen above it and gone far beyond that.

India definitely makes you feel this. I know this one senior guy who lived for a very long time in New York (~10 years) after his grad school and moved a few years back to Mumbai. He is very rich but he says that he feels poorer in Mumbai than he ever felt in New York, even compared with the time when he working in his first job, fresh out of grad school.