Hi Rottu, great to hear the facts on India. I've heard many of them from various sources, but it's nice to see them compiled all toghether. In fact, you should have posted it as an article!

Your heart also must be beating when a girl is harrased at every step whenever she leaves home, it also must be beating when thousands of young women every year are killed for dowry, your heart also must be beating looking at our mentally handicapped politicians. Grow up girl and stop being a "frog in the well", travel the world rather than heaping praises on this third world country.

u r in ur teens, arn't u? seems to b...nice article but a bit overly patriotic, poetic n childish...long way to go, keep on writing. everythin is good, except th fact of comparison with th west...every culture is good, nothin is bad...its th way u look at things... for example - suppose for the sake arguement, wht if i say...that indian culture is a hyppocritical culture, where people can "pee" in public but not kiss, as compared to the west where people can kiss in public, but not pee?

My clandestine affair with India began, if I remember quite precisely, in a lift. I was six. A strikingly handsome man of Indian descent stepped in, with his similarly striking wife. My mother and I couldn?t help but stare. After he stepped out at the sixth floor, my mother said to me: ?Girl, if you marry an Indian man, you can give me very good-looking grandchildren.? I still don?t have the heart to tell her I wasn?t looking at the man. I was thinking, in fact, of India, and how the word rolled off my tongue with such mystery and aplomb. Cut to present day, modern Singapore, a pappadum addiction and many eyebrow threadings later. I?m sitting in a morning class listening to my lecturer drone on about resumes and other ridiculous stuff tailored for the future accountant/ banker this school is so good at producing. I?m suddenly seized with the brilliant idea? I HAVE to be in India this December. I have to, I want to, I?d love to; I?m going to be thinking about it until I do, and even then I wouldn?t be able to get enough of it. I get asked a lot: Why India? Why not? Why? Because I love India. Why do you love India? Because I do, and why don?t you? But where do I begin? I?ve constantly said that falling in love with India is a little like falling in love with the ugliest girl in class. You want to scream your love from the mountains but you can?t ? people might laugh at you. You never thought you?d fall for her, it was such a remote possibility in the first place. But you did, and now you can?t expect anyone to understand, unless they?ve fallen for someone like her before. To say India is an assault on the senses is putting it very lightly. To be sure, if you wanted to, you could visit her and insulate yourself perfectly from her ? hire a driver, never walk on the streets, stay in the Oberoi, never break into a sweat despite the heat. But what?s the fun in that? It would be comfortable, insulated, clean, everything India isn?t. It takes a kind of madness to love cities where the PSI is constantly 300-400, there?s a dalit shooting himself up with heroin under the bridge, traffic is chaos and but then so is everything else. But you can?t explain away an emotional attachment. Or maybe I suffer from some distant variant of Stockholm Syndrome.

Gud to read the partrioctic script..But I'ill like to add tat no culture is bad or weird its just our perception how we perceive the things.n.secondly, moving out of India for work is a nice option I guess coz u can anytime return back to ur country but once if u go abroad for work n then returns then definately u have sum gud offers to bargain...N thirdly if u love someone eternally let it be ur contry, ur mother ur family then distance doesn't matter..U can always feel the bonding...

Simply a great article. I could feel an Indian senesation (shivers) running throughout my body while reading this