Culture & Lifestyle: India vs. America. Who's superior? My take...

Culture

It's America for me. I know, it's tough for me to say this, being an Indian & staying in India all my life. But that's what I feel, & here's why:

     We speak of Indian culture & stuff, but it's not much existent in contemporary India, to be honest. We have got it all mixed up with the west. So, we haven't got much of an identity ourselves which we did a century ago... Whereas Americans, they have it well-sorted out...That's what culture is all about...it's the way of life & the thinking of the nation, not its individual citizens.

Some hardcore patriotic Indians might argue that we lost some of our cultural oneness just because we were in the British influence for 2 centuries...I beg to differ, because we are noticing an increase in the cultural & economic disparities in the last 15-20 years rather than immediate post-independence. In fact, Brits made things easier for us..they gave us postal system, railways, telephones etc while they were here. Otherwise India still would have been counted in the underdeveloped countries even after having the money with us which the British stole away...

What we have lost is our "cultural homogeneity"...We do many things which is Indian, but we also do many things that we directly ape from the west....the way we dress up, the transition of the spoken language from Hindi to English, our eating habits, socializing, etc...However, the west has hardly copied anything from us...It has maintained its culture, while we have crawled towards a state of cultural instability...


Lifestyle

Both of the countries are at the same level, but in very different ways. Most of us Indians stay with our family, we don't have very strict rules, regulations & laws that we follow.  And we are not much into recession. America scores on the per capita income level & self-service idea of life...But with the Indians taking on all the bad stuff from the American lifestyle like drinking, live-ins, extravagant shopping, etc, I expect India to go a steep low on lifestyle in the near future, compared to America.

My thoughts reveal another shift from the general notion that social well-being & economic development always complement each other... I'll give you an example...
   China, which has the world's 3rd largest GDP, is the fastest developing economy in the world. The per capita income of an average Chinese is much higher than that of an average Indian...It is the back-office & the factory of the entire world... But know what? No Chinese wants to be reborn as a Chinese... It's a strongly communist nation. The Govt. treats the people over there as machines, not humans...China is progressive, it's got tons of money, got great infrastructure building underway, everything appears rosy....but at what cost?? human lives & humanity..There's no personal choice or individual freedom. There's neither respect nor value of an individual...It's just about the bird-eye view of the entire economy.
    So, the point I'm trying to make is that standard of living & quality of life do not always go hand in hand... It's high time India realiszes this fact. India might have produced many business tycoons & stalwarts...but the life of an avg Indian is deteriorating day by day...The GDP growth might be very high, but the gap between the rich & poor is increasing too...If the number of rich people is increasing, the number of poor is also following suit...This is not the case in America or any other European nation. The disparity is not so vast. We speak of making Mumbai a Shanghai & have constructed the Bandra-Worli sea-link as a starter...But look at Dharavi, which is the world's largest slum, also in Mumbai...

    You might think I am one of those guys who find the grass greener on the other side. But I am not. I still say the grass is greener on our side. We just need to water it properly. India is better than America in a few aspects of culture like spiritual enlightenment, concept of joint family, less mechanization of life, etc...but we need to conserve those pluses.