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Comment by RajT88 | Hacker News Reader

> In August 2018, in the last month of my three-month sabbatical, I arrived at the Hamta village in Himachal Pradesh. I rented a one-room cottage, and my caretakers were Dolma Aunty and Kalzang Uncle, a couple well into their 70’s.

I got to this part and realized: I've read this article before in some form.

It's a really common trope to head out to some remote area of Asia and admire how happy people are. There's often a spiritual component to it. I will write the guy a bit of a pass, because he himself is (I think) Indian.

But westerners have been doing stuff like this for ages and prattling on about it - it's kind of a cornerstone of Orientalism. This was actually a plot point in the recent White Lotus season. People rarely go to Appalachia to have these experiences, but you certainly can find people living simple happy lives there. (At least, if they do, nobody publishes those articles - it doesn't fit our preconceived notions of who gets to be enlightened, which is to say it has to be some place far away and people very different than your average Americans)

Not to say there's no value in this article (there is), and it was a fun read at that.

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> But westerners have been doing stuff like this for ages and prattling on about it - it's kind of a cornerstone of Orientalism. This was actually a plot point in the recent White Lotus season. People rarely go to Appalachia to have these experiences, but you certainly can find people living simple happy lives there.

I think you're moralizing over a pretty bland bit of psychology: people need to be shaken from their frame of reference to see different parts of the world. Even if they exist next door. For many Americans, Appalachia will be too close to home to force off the blinders.

I've flown all over the US for work, and in every location found the same exact city. It's hard to take away someone's footing when they feel at home. OTOH, the preconditions that gave me many life broadening experiences within 100 miles of a single US city are not available to everyone.

Assigning someone internal character traits so that their external practice of respectful travel can still be judged is cruel.

Agreed. I think beyond tourist voyeurism, there is something really maturing(?) about being inserted into a completely different culture where people seem to be content. I grew up in rural Wisconsin and even the micro-change of moving away for college in a place like St. Louis had very important implications for my worldview.

As someone from the US who's traveled all over the country for fun, I can assure you there are loads of delightfully unique places and rich communities that think and act quite differently from each other.

But yes I could see how work travel only could make them feel like carbon copies - both from the mindset you'd be in and from the types of places you might only go for work.

Places you go for work are mostly corporate parks in the suburbs. Of course they all feel the same. I had the same experience and that was why - rarely did I get to visit the big cities. I went to places which had Chili's and Target and Outback Steakhouse.

On the odd times I visited DC or SF or Toronto - really amazing and different experiences.

Both the DC and SF metro areas have Chili's, Target, and Outback. Can you articulate what made DC and SF "really amazing and different experiences" from one another, beyond vibes? Asking as an American who's pretty sure it's all the same here (and has traveled internationally to places where it's not).

I'll try. YMMV, but:

DC:

You can get just about any kind of food - because just about every culture in the world is represented. You can find some of the more home-y type menu options too for the same reason. For example, Greek restaurants where I am at don't generally have Taramosalata (carp roe dip). Due to the shorter flights to Africa, the is a much larger African population in the DC area. One trip, I bought some Nigerian movies at a gas station. Then there's all the historical stuff - tomb of the unknown soldier, Vietnam wall, Air & Space Museum, etc. As I wandered around town on one of my early trips there, I keep seeing things I thought were very familiar - and it turns out at least some were because Bethesda (HQ'd nearby) had done an awesome job recreating apocalypse versions of them in Fallout 3 (which I played a lot of).

SF:

I went cycling a few times with a friend of mine. We went over the Golden Gate bridge, which was amazing. Also to the top of some mountain (big hill?) overlooking the city. What a view! I like to fish, and dropped a line near my hotel and caught a leopard shark. I saw an old Japanese homeless man wheel a little red wagon on a pier near the Mozilla HQ (near the many-billion dollar company I was visiting), and catch a pile of Jacksmelt using a spark plug as a sinker. There is a lot of excellent Asian-influenced dining options - my personal favorite is Lilo Lilo Yacht Club. I got to see a tent city of what appeared to be techies - all really nice huge family-sized tents, well dressed and apparently happy and well fed. One time, I was having a drink in a bar in SFO, and chatted up a guy who had just come from an executive meeting with a bunch of VP's and CTO's of Sony, where chewed them out about their usage of Kubernetes. I saw a shirtless man walking around with what appeared to be pony boots? I assume part of the gay scene.

Now - you may not like all that, but you are not generally having those experiences near suburban corporate parks. Yes, they have Outback Steakhouses, but they have rather a lot more going on.

Hmm, thanks for going into detail. My point wasn't so much that you can experience everything a city has to offer in a corporate park. It was more that most US cities offer roughly the same things.

I know I can get Greek and Asian food in both St. Louis and Denver. I just confirmed that both cities have Greek places with Taramosalata; I know from dating a Chinese girl for a year that both of those cities have extremely authentic Asian places. I've seen gay men walking around in at least Denver and Calgary (not even US).

Now, being able to browse and buy a Nigerian movie at a gas station instead of needing to get it online is something that might qualify if it's truly exclusive to DC. The techie "tent city" in California is probably unique to California, you've got me on that one.

Having visited plenty of U.S. history/military/science/etc museums across several midwestern/western states, those could probably be argued either way. On one hand, of course every museum will have different artifacts/exhibits/etc that mean it's not quite the same at every one, and there are individual facts that you could learn at one but not another. On the other hand, I think the likelihood of coming across something in a US museum that noticeably expands my human experience is lower than the likelihood of that happening in another continent's museums.

Well if it is the unique things, there is still many unique things in the big cities. If you are discounting the vibe, I guess I understand why you are disappointed. The vibe is a big part of what makes big cities feel so distinctive.

If you think DC is samey, maybe your expectations around uniqueness are higher than your average person's. Lol. I have not gone out drinking (much) there, but I would wager it would not take long to end up with insane stories about people you read about in the news.

> If you are discounting the vibe, I guess I understand why you are disappointed. The vibe is a big part of what makes big cities feel so distinctive.

The reason I'm "discounting the vibe" is because "vibe" doesn't mean anything. It's a non-word. You need to say something specific to argue that a place is unique. What makes up the "vibe?" The fact that you heard someone playing music on the street, which you assume is indicative of the entire city and no other city? A style of graffiti that may or may not be special? Saying you got a "vibe" from a place tells me you had some experiences there that you associate with it. I only drank root beer while I visited Texas and now I remember my trips to Texas when I drink root beer, but that doesn't mean the root beer I drank and Texas would have anything to do with each other for anyone but me.

(That's why I said "beyond vibes," as in "in more depth than vibes," not just "aside from vibes." Because you could be right, the vibes could be different, but the word "vibe" is no way to explain it to someone who doesn't already know. So I can't know if your idea of a "vibe" is really unique or not without knowing what you actually mean by that.)

> I have not gone out drinking (much) there, but I would wager it would not take long to end up with insane stories about people you read about in the news.

I don't drink alcohol at all. Trying to see politicians act irresponsibly is probably something that's easier to do in a place where lots of politicians live/work, yeah.

There are actually no Chili's or Outback or Applebee's or most national chains you can think of in San Francisco. You said "metro area", I have no idea what this means in this context given most people like the city itself, not the sprawling strip mall towns on the peninsula which is not San Francisco. The city limits are pretty well defined here.

My saying "metro area" was in reference to the fact that your artificially drawn tax border defining "city limits" do not mean you live in a vacuum separate from the surrounding area or that your city has a unique culture just because it doesn't have one chain or another within its tax border.

> I've flown all over the US for work, and in every location found the same exact city.

I think you can find the exact same city if you like but I also have found much more. Simply LA and NY are very different places, as are different communities in those cities.

Rather reminds me of Pratchetts character Lu-Tze, who having seen so many travel to the monasteries to achieve enlightenment decides to travel to Ankh Morpork and learns many ancient wisdoms ('Is it not written "Oo, you are so sharp you'll cut yourself one of these days."?')

It’s a common trope among urban Indians. They’re enamoured by the simple and rustic living of the villages and think of them as noble savages.

I grew up in rural India and I always recommend people to read Dr. Ambedkar’s rights on this subject.

Dr. Ambedkar is somebody more people in the United States should know about. I was a briefly involved with the Triratna Buddhist Community and read some of Sangharakshita's writing, and he discusses Ambedkar. Real interesting stuff.

TBH Dr. Ambedkar’s Buddhism is very different from what the other traditions preach. It was an answer to the prevailing jātivada, but unfortunately it didn’t manage to make the dent he envisioned.

I’ve grown up around Navayana and have many friends from Kagyu, Theravada and other traditions.

(All this to say I know Bauddha Dharma intimately)

All part of the great warp and weft. It's a fascinating thing to learn about, how all these traditions intersect.

Seattle, the city I live in, recently became the first to ban caste discrimination. I didn't think much of it at the time, but nowadays maybe there's something to be learned from jātivada, the many forms it comes in, and the response to it. Reading Leslie Feinberg right now, interesting working class perspective.

There’s a difference between casteism and jātivada which is not easy to explain in a short comment. Ambedkar’s “ Annihilation of Caste” and A.M. Hocart’s works provide interesting insight on it.

Hamta isn't even really rural. It's a bunch of homestays just outside of Manali, and is similar to Pahalgam.

My family is from rural HP/JK/Ladakh, and a homestay like Hamta is not representative of rural HP/JK/LA/UK.

> They’re enamoured by the simple and rustic living of the villages and think of them as noble savages

I think it goes both ways. They either over-idealize it, or overly berate it.

I feel it's also state dependent to a certain extent, with some states better at rural administrative capacity (eg. Kerala, HP, PB, JK) than others (eg. KA, TG, GJ).

Something I've noticed is states that don't have a primary city tend to have slightly better rural administrative capacity, as it at least incentivizes small town or T3/4 economies to develop instead of being invested in a single mega city.

Thanks for adding extra context. I wasn’t aware of Hamta. My experience is in rural central and South India but I’ve travelled extensively in Garhwal. How different would you say rural JK/HP/LA/UK is?

Your last para rings true. Goa, Kerala, CG and Odisha have better rural administration than MH, TL or KA because of the absence of heavyweight cities.

> How different would you say rural JK/HP/LA/UK is?

Rural UK is much poorer than rural HP and JK.

The administrative structure of UK is very top heavy (everything is decided in Dehradun), and Dehradun+Haridwar have caused tourism and real estate induced Dutch Disease to arise. JK and HP also have a tourism economy, but also have a strong industrial base (pharma in HP, heavy industry in JK) plus more investment in higher value rural industries like food processing and fruit cultivation.

HP and JK also have a bottom up political culture with panchayats in a district coalescing into District Planning Committee that includes state civil service cadre and the MLA, so local governance is much more responsive, and has the resources and capacity to invest in infra like cold storage or make the case for an MNC to invest in manufacturing.

Basically, if local government and administration is actually given priority beyond haphazard panchayats, it makes it easier to attract build industries and a semi-industrial rural economy.

> Kerala, CG and Odisha have better rural administration than MH, TL or KA because of the absence of heavyweight cities.

Political culture is also more top-down in states like MH/TG/KA, where the CM office tends to have inordinate control over local planning and panchayat+local government funding is minimal

Even if their administrations had some interest in rural economic development (which in those states they don't), they wouldn't even have the bandwidth because there are too many districts. This is why local government needs to be invested in by states, but locals are the ones who know best about their needs and capabilities.

Great comment, thank you for sharing it. I’ve seen some of it in Garhwal where villages didn’t get proper attention by the Govt. We keep forgetting that states in India are akin to states in Europe.

A modern version of Gram Swaraj combined with Switzerland type canton system might work well but there are no incentives for the administration for that.

I'm not sure a canton type system is necessary if the Gram Swaraj system sees further investment and is coupled with delimitation for legislative assemblies, it would solve most of the pressing problems.

A lopsided population to MLA ratio makes it easier for MLAs to be disconnected from local government, and incentivizes governance through internal party machinery (beg the CM or the local party leadership to get your MLA or DM to do something) instead of via the local administration, which further deprofessionalizes local government.

> We keep forgetting that states in India are akin to states in Europe.

Pretty much. Even within states the diversity is insane (eg. MP, KA, or UP would be better served split into 3-4 states).

JK's interesting history from partition onward has definitely biased its political culture to inspiring bottom-up, panchayat-forward governance.

I think that as tropey as such a practice is, there's a fundamental valid reason to do trips of this sort. You want to meet people as culturally remote and distant from you as you think exist, that you are still theoretically comfortable with. Then you want to be assured or refuted directly through your direct senses on things that you think are fundamental to the human condition. From such an experience you gain confidence on what you think is important to life and living.

A simpler explanation is that Americans have succumbed to consumerism to such an extent that the absence of it feels enlightened.

Of course the reality is just that the US has become the axis of evil, and perhaps always was, it just had the best PR.

I think you're doing yourself a disservice by belitting Asian cultures and what insights they may have, that are apparently incomprehensible as more than a trope to Americans.

America is the best because citizens can do basically whatever they want all the time. The latest complaints are people took it too far (rampant drug use, camping on sidewalks, and shitting everywhere in San Francisco, etc.).

But if you want to buy a rural cabin on a beautiful mountain, it’s available, and cheap. You don’t need to go to Asia to live like a hermit.

> America

Obviously America refers to the continent, so I'll use the shorthand country name "the US" instead.

> is the best

That may be true, but I do wonder if it was a lucky accident. What if the Irish famine hadn't happened? What if WW2 had been averted (but maybe the EU wouldn't exist...).

> rural cabin

That's nice, but what value is it if the forest burns down, the lake is polluted, the wild life is dead, and there's nothing left but neighboring land full of fracking wells? Glory to god.

You just have no idea how incredibly enormous and empty the US is

And yet, every viable plot of land is used for farming.

Similarly, I would argue that you should not underestimate the harmful and wide-reaching effects of industry.

Ehh US farmland usage has been dropping for many decades. That said, it is only because we are more than ever reliant upon fossil fuel derived fertilizer and over utilize a lot of arid/desert farming

>every viable plot of land is used for farming.

It is? Not in the US!

Try using Google Maps in Satellite View. You'd be hard pressed to find land that isn't used agriculturally.

IIUC, the land that is unutilized or has forest, is either protected, too hilly, too dry, etc.

Consider New England, where in its early days most inhabitants consisted of farming families. Where there were farms and cow pastures, there is now mostly forest.

There are a few farms remaining in New England, yes, but in general farmers consider the soil there not worth farming compared to places like Iowa and Southern Illinois (where all the land really is utilized for farming) even though in the past most the (sizeable) population of New England made a living farming.

We know that most of the forest in New England is suitable for farming because there are still stone walls running through it: these wall were made of stones encountered by farmers while plowing (when the forest was farmland).

> Of course the reality is just that the US has become the axis of evil, and perhaps always was, it just had the best PR.

Sigh.

Yes, the Soviet Union really was the worker's paradise with free, prosperous, happy people!

Can we get away from the sophomoric idea the USA was ALWAYS the ONLY source of badness in the world, just because right now it's the most powerful nation in the world and also a complete mess?

I suspect that the communist project has lived under constant fear of the US, that the economy ultimately was bankrupted from having to defend itself against the US war machine.

The US has waged war in virtually every country around the world, for example Afghanistan, Vietnam, and Korea, which were significant threats to both Soviet and China. China has virtually been besieged since the 1950s, with Americans present in Thailand, Philippines, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea.

How would you feel if the Soviet installed weapons systems in Canada, Hawaii, Mexico, Greenland, and Cuba? And then started a tariff war to hopefully bankrupt your economy?

Wasn't communism influenced heavily by being anti-capitalist? They fundamentally disagreed with the tenants that the United States stood on. Your comment, if I'm understanding it correctly, makes it look like the communists were just trying to do their own thing in their own countries and the big bad U.S came in and bullied them out of existence.

I'm not defending either sides here. I'm not a Reaganot. But to think most communist regimes were not hellbent on the destruction of western capitalism would seem a bit misleading to me.

That is fair; I think the reality is nuanced and that different opinions existed at the same time and were warring internally in the Soviet Union. In particular, IIUC, Trotsky thought that "a socialist revolution must spread internationally to succeed and cannot be confined to one nation" (OpenAI) - but he was also assassinated by Stalin's order, and the assassin was honored by Brezhnev. Stalin was assassinated as well.

It's a great tragedy if they felt threatened by capitalism, and capitalism by communism, in a self-perpetuating way that could have been avoided.

But I would argue that capitalism has its roots in aristocracy, imperialism, and private ownership (i.e. slavery, colonialism, and systemic exploitation), to an extent that it is fair to say that capitalism cannot co-exist with communist ideals.

But yes, European countries were heavily influenced by communist ideology, which continues to shape our values today, about well-regulated free markets, fair taxation, public service, and so on, which directly threatened capitalist interests, and arguably that's why we're seeing a rise in fascism, in an attempt to remove these communist ideals.

To be clear, I am confused on this matter, but I do think that the Europeans have been foolish to follow US doctrine for the last 50 years (since Reagan/Thatcher), and especially the last 10-20 years have been devastating on virtually every sector of the economy.

> But yes, European countries were heavily influenced by communist ideology, which continues to shape our values today, about well-regulated free markets, fair taxation, public service, and so on

So this is the first time I've seen well-regulated free markets and fair taxation as being associated with communist ideology. Granted, I'm not well-studied here, but I recall being taught quite the opposite.

I did some preliminary research uisng Gemini Research to see if I could surface anything that might suggest this has been universally regarded as true and it came back with the opposite on the first (well-regulated free markets) and ambiguity on the second (not universally associated with communism).

Would you be able to reference a place where I can learn more about these relationships?

I don't remember the original argument anymore. Something about communism being justification for US warmongering.

Personally I think 19th century communism was context-specific to the 19th century; we now have AI, and central planning could be done with the same computational efficiency as the stock market.

For me, communism is more about fundamental beliefs. Like "Do you believe in Jesus Christ as your savior?", the fundamental question is: do you believe that the state should serve all mankind, and that private ownership should never extend over more than what an individual can reasonably consume? Which then necessitates public service infrastructure and market places.

I think "social democrats" have more thoughts on practical applications. "Communism" is more about fundamental beliefs, i.e. the right to nationalize and collectivize private ownership. For example, it is increasingly clear that Microsoft, Amazon, etc. are becoming tyrants. They should have been broken up into smaller companies years ago. Imagine if Windows, Office, Xbox, Azure, etc. were each produced by fully independent companies? And if those companies were fundamentally obligated to serve the public market.

Also, IIUC, China is communist but has a "socialist market economy", so the two are not mutually exclusive.

Damn, in 2025 the USSR is still an excuse for the US? x) Come on.

Saying that US-exported consumerism is a blight on the world is a perfectly valid thing to say. No need to invoke "the Reds" to pretend it's not.

"Communism" is the age-old American scarecrow that is used to justify the unjust.

I agree that this is a common trope but the rest of your comment reads like, "Hey westerners, go find your own rural people and stop appropriating mine".

Also completing your logic loop, this guy is apparently stealing intellectual ideas from (mediocre) westerners.

There’s also some self-selection here.

If you go to another place and someone lets you stay with them, they are probably in a good place in life. You are selecting yourself to meet with happier people.

You won’t be making as many friends with unhappy people.

Well, maybe there's something to it. I think it's great when East meets West. East should keep meeting West over and over and over. Maybe one day East will know West and vice versa.

For what it's worth, I had something of a similar experience, but it was in a plywood shack on a desert island off the coast of California.

The America's have the 'noble savage' trope to find enlightenment with. It became so blatantly co-opting anothers' religion that many Native American tribes still refuse to teach non-tribal members there spiritual practices.

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