Introduction

Welcome.  Many of you, either via email or when I see you in person, have asked me, “How is India?”  This is a very hard question to answer succinctly.  India is a lot of things and I have a lot of feelings about different parts.  It is a country that defies easy generalizations.  El Salvador was a small, homogeneous population of 6 million people.  Canada was more diverse, but still a relatively small population of 37 million.  The Philippines did have several distinct sub-cultures, but most of my exposure was in the north, where the culture is fairly uniform.  The Philippines was three times the population of Canada, at 105 million.  India is 1.3 billion people - with many large and distinct regions.  It’s tough to wrap your head around all the history, languages, religions, customs, and culture here.  So in this blog I plan to focus on one thing at a time that I notice is unique to India.  Or if not unique to India, at least new and interesting to me as an American living here for a few years.  Hopefully this will at least partially begin to answer the question, “How is India?”