ETA- In Bombay, I grew up in a liberal environment/ part of the city that can only rival certain areas of manhattan and maybe some cities in western europe.

This friend won’t.

It reminds me that joy and affection are still worthy goals in such a dismal, war-torn world.

My biggest culture shock was always on the bus between Mathura and New Delhi. To go from such two different headspaces in such a short period of time (3hours), was a real body/mind/soul trip.

For instance – the transition in terms of clothing(or the lack of it) was significant enough to be called a culture shock . But other things like the conservatism, religious beliefs etc were just so ridiculously backwards here. I completely agree that it depends on which part of India you are from and where exactly in the US you arrive at.

That may be true, and I have little anecdotal evidence either way, having mostly lived in urban areas in the East and the Midwest. I actually like the Midwest better, for various reasons (except the weather…good grief).

However, I did live in a very small Midwestern town (for college), and I didn’t find its social mores that foreign to me, as a desi person from the East coast. Also, I didn’t run into any intolerance or discrimination, but that was a pre-9/11 world, and college towns are different from other small towns.

I also realize my experience of small towns is probably the norm. I grew up in a smaller city in Canada, where I was the only Indian in my entire elementary school. I probably just dated myself by admitting that!

Dunno – I live here now, but I find it different in ways that irk me … Basically, outside of the big cities, tolerance declines faster than it does in the Northeast. That’s grist for another post though.

I can’t speak for the South, having never lived there and having visited only infrequently. However, having lived on the East coast and the Midwest, I think the so-called cultural differences between the areas are grossly exaggerated. Yes, there are minor differences (and I don’t discount the possibility that a person from urban India and a person from small-town India will have different perspectives), but the Midwest is not different “in significant ways”, IMO.

I know you speak broad-brush, but the details are also interesting, and perhaps significant. I don’t think someone moving from a college in Mumbai to, just for example, NYU – experiences anything like what a student from, say, Gorakhpur, experiences in, small-town Texas. And, although we go over this every few days here at SM, the East and West coasts are different from the Midwest and the South, in significant ways, and to expect this not to reflect in the experiences of the freshly-arrived is naive.

Yes, but we still hold meetups in Chicago.