Hacker News Reader

Comment by _y5hn | Hacker News Reader

India has lots of villages, slums and people in between having very poor material standards compared to Western countries. But people are also much more interconnected, rely on each other and find ways to get by. So to get that culture, you have to spend at least 6 months and really get to know what family values are, and how things tend to work out. It's very different than the lonely individualist countries. Many Indians actually move back home to be with family and friends!

So superficial analyses may just not be very recognizable to the population, because of very different value systems and nuances.

View on HN

Personally, that's the biggest lesson that I got from traveling in India. There's no question that people's living standard needs to be improved there, but I saw something that's lacking in a developed country (especially in the country I live): mutual help, or the "love your neighbor" mindset. I hope that tradition last long.

As someone who immigrated to the US from India, and was a 'stereotypical nerd' (being on HN duh) nosy neighbors seem nice on the outside but it can get old really quick. (Unless you're perfectly average for the community you live in). I much prefer making friends at work or other common interest places rather than neighbors or family who randomly happen to be next to you.

Tbh anyone nosy. Every time I visit my parents back home, I realize how exasperatingly nosy they are. They can't stick to minding their own business, and honestly it's something that they picked up with age - I guess to be a part of the general "community". And the amount of mental gymnastics they perform to analyze trivial mind-numbing stuff....

I guess it's something that's as ingrained in the Indian psyche as turmeric is in Indian cuisine.

Same with age here in Europe. I believe they call it family, ugh! ;)

That's very true, but I think it's possible to a) have a fact-based approach without being superficial, and b) communicate cultural context without having to plumb the depths of the human condition.

Were it necessary to cover the subtle nuances of Eastern and Western culture, it would be hard to get anywhere with prose. I think it's sufficient to convey enough information to demonstrate that the value systems and lived experiences are fundamentally different.

The goal is not to "level the playing field" in terms of where people are coming from, but to foster more meaningful discussions by explicitly taking context into account.

But it takes the plumbing the depths of the human condition to realize that we're not actually a that different, and that the fundamentals are the SAME. Airy eloquent prose may not have the same effect on the data driven as hard metrics, but comparing $20,000 (US) a year to the equivalent of $1 US a day, without capturing, in prose, that person in the US below the poverty line may be going hungry more days a week, and is more exposed to the elements, and more likely to be harrassed by police/others and more likely to die, is superficial.

Prose is what's needed to communicate effectively. Tables and charts simply can't do that by themselves. Even they need a legend and labels to be useful.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com