Item — HN Reader

"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.

2 comments

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.

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.