“Indian exceptionalism” is a prevalent notion among the middle/upper class of India - i.e. the quality of life in India is comparable to other countries. You’ll hear it most from the people who have servants taking care of their household chores (but never the servants themselves). There are also common excuses thrown around like “it has only been 75 years since colonialism” and “the British stole everything”.

I was born in India, grew up in the US, and remember many visits back to the motherland where a relative would extol the virtues of “coming back”. I also remember getting sick all the time, abhorrent public restrooms, sitting in traffic for hours, etc.

Anyone from an actual modern country would agree with you on this, but many Indians living in India would not.

It's not hard to understand why repatriation is economically attractive. People who have worked in the West for a decade or two live like kings in India because their accumulated savings goes so far. This huge difference in purchasing power and labor cost is, of course, a characteristic of a developing nation.

The potential problem is: you've spent a big chunk of your adult life living in a developed nation, and despite your massively enhanced purchasing power, you are returning to a developing one, with all the concomitant physical discomforts and social ills.

But social ills are only a problem if you acknowledge them, and physical discomforts are largely solved with a money bubble, so... there we are.

Something doesn’t sit right though, no? You can’t fix horrendous pollution regardless of the amount of money you have and the differential of the modern/developing economies yields. You might have a bigger garden but the city won’t have a biking lane. You might be able to afford private health care but if you rely once on public care (ie: you get into an accident somewhere) then you are screwed.

It’s more expensive to live in a non-developed country than a developed one. Now a close to developed country might be an interesting choice since the prices are still low but the quality is fairly similar.

I feel like "social ills are only a problem if you acknowledge them", while not wrong, really downplays the differences.

Having spent more time of my life in more developed countries, I find that a lot of little behaviors that are normal back in India really grate on me which aren't as big of a thing in, say, the US.

Basic things like behavior on public transport, over in the US you can generally seem to rely on people standing to the sides of the door in a rough line until people have stepped off, while in India you have to push your way through the crowd trying to push its way in. It's hard to get used to those sorts of things, and many of them aren't meaningfully addressed by simply being wealthy (since similar behaviors carry over to, say, shopping).

Plus, it's even worse for women, who really can't just not acknowledge social ills in India as they can have a significant influence on their safety.

I had this discussion with several Indians and I don’t get it. It’s not that India is just far from any modern country by any definition, they are also significantly far from developing countries and I’d say they are the worst Hindu/Buddhist country out there. Polluted, Over-crowded, Underfunded infrastructure, Unreliable services, etc.. Many neighboring countries have figured out this stuff even though they still don’t have the job market of modern countries.

They do seem to be improving on the infra. front. But compared to China, they are walking with a turtle’s speed.