In the middle of posting this, someone just told me that many previously colonized countries have to outport their goods at an uneven exchange, and India has their culture as a product. Is there a lot of white washing disrespectful appropriation? Are there lots of cults too?
by what measure is india a major hotspot? i think most tourism in india is domestic.
In hippy-ish baby boomer and millennial circles, portraits of hindu figures can be common. I would see them on random people’s social media pages after they got into psychedelics. When I was a kid, I overheard the beginning of two adults, who just met, discussing their own seperate trips to India. I didnt hear beyond a few sentences since I minded my own business and left.
This all gives me the impression that interest in India is common. Idk if many foreigners to India actually travel to India. Perhaps I’m wrong.
Only the top like 5% of hippies travel to India. I think the peak of Indian spiritual export to the US was in the late 60s/early 70s. You had a lot of people looking for answers outside of their cultural norms. They did sex, drugs, rock and roll, and “eastern spirituality”. A bunch of Indian “gurus” capitalized on this interest and established branches of their cults in “the west”. Many persist to this day, though they mostly fall off pretty hard once the old Indian guy dies.
yeah i know the kind of people you’re talking about but i actually don’t think there are that many of them. i certainly havent met someone like that in years and years.