It is hard to give a well rounded response to the post and yet keep it short. So I will not even try. A lot has been written about India, so people who want to know more will dig deep on their own, whereas many will be happy with poverty porn.

One thing that I do want to mention is that India is a very high variance country. For almost any statement one makes, there will be a un-ignorable part of the country where the statement is not true. To get a truer picture of India, always keep that in mind. A part of the variance is not only spatial but also temporal. Depending on the time you choose to travel, your impression of Mumbai's city train system can be poles apart.

In the post it was claimed that author felt safe in India. That automatically gave the author's gender away, especially given the names of the places he visited. India's capital and most of the north and western states (Gujarat excluded) are highly unsafe if you are a girl and alone. Even the locals will not venture out in the evening unaccompanied by the opposite sex. Sexual violence and molestation is a daily affair. It is even ethnically targeted. If you are a girl from the north-east, India's capital is not a friendly place.

On the other hand visit Chennai, Mumbai, Pune (by no means an exhaustive list) nobody will give it a second thought if an unattended girl has to travel in the wee hours of the night, even if wearing a mini fortune in jewelery.

Every so often in 7 years a north/west/central region of it will erupt in politically motivated inter-religion violence and riots of the worst kind. There would be thousands dead, injured, burned and raped (yeah, I am not making this up), but no one will get punished.

On the other hand states like Kerala, West Bengal havent had such violence ever since the creation of independent India. But measure them along the axis of economic growth, the latter will come up in very unflattering colors.

In certain regions of India, you will find bribes to be business as usual. In the south, (barring Karnataka) that is certainly not the norm. Sometimes the differences are so great that sometimes when you hear the stories from the other side you cannot help but wonder, "is it the same country !"

Some cities are poster-children of bad traffic, some are pretty decent compared to Indian average.

In some cities the form of the garbage disposal is that you throw it on the street, whereas in others you will have regular system that collects it off the dumpsters and empties it on the landfills. Furthermore it is not correlated with the perceived wealth of a city or town. Some of the poorer ones are cleaner and more organized.

Most of India is male-dominated and patriarchal whereas the north-eastern states are matriarchal. In many states it is still customary for the girl's family to pay huge amounts in dowry, and a matter of peer pride for the boy's family, whereas in many parts, (kerala, west bengal) dowry is frowned upon. It is not completely absent but when such a transaction does take place, it is sneaked in different ways and peer pressure works against it.

In the northern and western states girl child foeticide is rampant, not so in the other states.

Lastly: Corruption is practiced differently in India and US. In US there is this revolving door between corporations and the govt that legitimizes corruption, whereas in India it is closer to cash under the table. Not claiming that one is better or worse than the other, just making an observation about how it is practiced.

Well he's not a late bloomer to the vast majority of people.

I think no matter your lot in life, if you're competitive, you get the feeling that you missed out on a lot that you could have accomplished. Stories of kids learning programming at 6, or starting companies at 16, etc, feed into this.

Even I feel like I would be much farther "ahead" if I had only started programming before high school, if I had been more gung-ho about college, if I had gone to California in 2010 after graduation instead of remaining in New Hampshire. I don't even know any programmers in person outside of my work. My "network" isn't something to put on a pedestal.

And yet by all accounts I live an extremely comfortable life, I wrote enough to get noticed and get a book deal just two years out of college, my friends think I'm of superhuman intellect, I'm able to walk to work every day, etc.

I think the kind of worry in this post is a response to the world born out of hyper-competitiveness, and I don't think its a healthy one. It's not a positive message, and the events that could turn it into a positive message for this person, the qualifications for "not being a loser", should never involve anything five or six sigma from the norm.

Look around you and relax. You've probably already won.

I find the notion that the SOPA protest woke up us previously apathetic Europeans somewhat insultingly US-centric.

Prior to SOPA, resistance against increasingly insane copyright legislation was considerably more widespread than it was in the US, partially triggered by events like the trial against the Pirate Bay, Sarkozy's three strikes sell-out etcetera.

There's a reason why we're the ones with the Pirate parties. We didn't need major corporations like Google campaigning to wake us up. Yeah, the defeat of SOPA was a major encouragement and inspiration, but the fight was already on.

The mistake the author made is that he lived in India for three weeks. Had he stayed for six months or a year, he'd have been able to figure out what makes India tick - India is the very embodiment of clever innovation to survive - it will ask you very tough questions and it will compel you to innovate, often rapidly, just in order to survive - not even succeed. This, in India, is known as "jugaad".

He missed the "jugaad" all around him - people, in their struggle for survival, do all sorts of things. Lying is jugaad, dishonesty is jugaad, the Cobra is jugaad, the marijuana in tourist places is jugaad, the beggar's strategic location is jugaad, the dump-heap is jugaad (not all jugaads are meant to make society better as a whole).

But maybe that's too naive. The most unfortunate in India are amongst the most fatalistic - they give up trying - after all, they never won the birth lottery by being born in Europe or the US, or even in a rich home in India - so why hope for social justice? Laws are meant to be broken in India, justice is meant not to be served (India is a study in legal arbitrage - it always has been). Life is meant to be tough in India, values are meant to eschewed. But even with all this, "jugaad" survives and serves its own brand of justice. The mistake most foreigners make in India is that they continue to believe in their ability to right the wrongs and make a change. A feeling of utter helplessness is very alien to them. It's coming to terms with that helplessness and digging out pockets of jugaad from that black mass of helplessness is what makes India tick.