Colour or Color?

I recently had a conversation with C, who seemed to like 'the Amerikka' a lot. I told C that yes, it is a likeable country with good folks, and is very similar to ours. That last phrase touched off a separate strain pertaining to how bad our country is, with bad roads, poor facilities, corruption, and so on and on and on. I tried convincing C that yes, our country has issues, but nothing insurmountable, and this side of the Atlantic too has a quite a few. After all, the so-called rich developed nations are so after being in India's current position. Alas, that did not help. C was on a mission to convince me that India is bad and worsening and that I should not come back. This was followed by an inexhaustible (to me, it seemed) list of complaints, and I began to wonder if C was a recent convert to some (dystopian) strain of Orwellian theory. Finally, I ended the conversation by saying that C should personally visit other places and find out personally.

This was followed by more conversations with others, so many of them that I cannot assign code names such as A, or B, since I would run out of all the letters of the alphabet. The only thing I gathered was that India was going down the drain and the US was everybody's idea of utopia. This observation was further reinforced by a recent poll in Reader's Digest where India had the highest proportion of polled people expressing an inclination to live in the US.

Why are folks so desperate to leave? Why is everyone trying to convince anyone who wishes to live in India not to?

I suppose the grass is always greener on the other side... and having US currency coloured green adds to it? Or maybe spelling that word 'color' is more attractive? :)