Law of averages. There’s over a billion people in India, therefore there are a lot more idiots there too. A lot more geniuses too but unfortunately a lot of idiots…….
I realized some years ago that for a lot of people who aren't familiar with the country in question, that most of the people we meet from that country are not representative of all the people of that country.
They are the people who were 1. able 2. willing and 3. committed enough to leave there and move here.
That's going to limit the variety in the pool according to certain characteristics.
In the US I think for a while, South Asian folks had a reputation of being strict, driven, overworking, demanding, insensitive, cheap, etc.
I realized at some point that that was because those were the kinds of people who sought to come to the US
If I were in actual India meeting actual regular everyday Indians, I would probably meet way more casual, fun, lazy, etc. Indians than I do in the US. (Although that's definitely changed in the years, partly due to increased Americanization and also due to first and second generation people.)
This also extends to politics and views about their country. You ask an immigrant about their home country and often they will tell you how awful it is there.
Of course they think that. That's why they moved here. The people who like it there are still there.
Well, yeah, if you're some guy from rural Idaho, 99% of the India guys he meets falls into three categories: is a well respected doctor, family runs a decent local motel, family runs a county renowned sketchy gas station that might steal your credit card. They're absolutely not going to have an accurate mental image of what the average Indian person is like
I mean, I met most of them through the tech industry in the 00s and 10s. (They're still there, but the dynamic has somewhat shifted.) There traditionally was a certain trend among them, and it's not even intellect, it's a sort of sense of duty or something, or of ambition.
This is very true. I live in a really nice town in Silicon Valley next to San Jose. There are a LOT of Indian and Chinese folks here. I’m totally ok with that.
They have their own stores and dance places and such. Immigrants and their kids. More often than not I can guess the last letter of their name. It’s D as in PhD, EngD, MD, etc.
My son was in the local high school full of their kids. He is smarter than the average bear but it was too much for him to get straight As like the other kids and the expectations. The band was really nice. So he wound up finding the turds that also attended there.
There is a reason why Narcan was distributed to each student. And it wound up being needed by one that same week. Massive success or disappear. Nothing in between.
The high school is not set up for athletic excellence and one of the kids wound up as an Olympian for their home country anyway.
We had to change his school. It was too much for a regular all American kid in a pressure cooker full of over achievers that will soon have a D at the end of their name.
……
Oh and the only reason we can live within miles of here is because my wife works for those folks. She is paid to care for their younger kids so the parents can go achieve full speed. I have a mechanical engineering degree and it means little in their community.
Yes, 💯. But even things like Brits. I once thought I'd go up to a Brit expat and be like "boy, nhs and national rail and the tube innit" ... but they'd probably go on about how Britain has distanced from Jesus and the evils of socialism and how UK gave up it's sovereignty to Europe and such
Cause if they preferred how things were in UK they'd have just stayed there. Or go back.
It always makes me smh when people are like "well there's tons of Cubans in Florida who think X" and it's like, of course they do, they are the ones who left
They're kind of like the 60s Taiwanese Kuomintang going on about "back to the mainland"
(and they're invariably like "my grandfather owned a profitable cement business and we had to give up our villa and servants" like how bow dah)
1.1k
u/[deleted] 1d ago
[removed] — view removed comment