northwest is what sets Pakistan really apart from India....(not Peshawar tho)...i guess Balochistan is also diff from India....it's the edges of India like far northern belt, north east and some edges of south like kerala with diversity of mountains and beaches within a small strip.........What really sets India apart is the richness of its big wildlife that is unmatched anywhere else outside of sub-Saharan Africa...and even SSA doesnot get the alpine megafauna like snow leopards etc like India does...India has excellent conservation legacy inspite of being dirt poor....This is one of the rare things that India can be TRULY proud of globally...Northern forests of europe as conserved as they may be, they are just managed gardens..nothing truly wild about them....
One thing I never get is White people's obsession with Indian spirituality especially Hindu spirituality...I guess successive Indian governments have done a lot in promoting certain aspects of Hinduism like Yoga, Vegetarianism, Hare Krishna sects, meditation, tantric massage etc etc
But that can overgloss the fact that much of Hinduism is no different than Haitian or African witchcraft, witch doctory and animism...possibly with deep roots in India since well before the time of agriculture
One thing I must say as I go forward in my 30s, I have a much deeper appreciation of Nehru and I think he was the best thing that could have happened for India with the possible of exception of Subhas Chandra Bose...Highly atheistic, agnostic, anti-superstition, anti-Hindu, pro-Buddhist....He was instrumental in restablishing India's image as the birthplace of Buddhism and did fund a lot of Buddhist studies....
But slowly we are again losing touch with our Buddhist legacy, which has a much cleaner,better, rational image than 90% of Hinduism...
On a different note, there is a certain vested group in Pakistan which is hellbent in projecting Pakistan as nothing more than an enlarged version of the Muslim locales of Mumbai, Chadni Chowk of Delhi, Bara Imambara of Lucknow
I mean Pakistan is so so so much more!! How many know that Pakistan is one of the hotspots of snow leopard population in the world? Snow Leopard was first filmed anywhere in the world in Pakistan in 2006 with BBC Planet Earth documentary
I had been seeing some Pak dramas based around North West around couple of years back (though fell of the wagon later)...The Pakistanis there seemed more like wealthy Afghans with the landed culture of upper tier rural Punjabis.........
This plays into politics as well ...I can understand when Kashmiri seperatists from India take refuge in Pakistan...I for life of me can never understand why somebody like Dawood Ibrahim from Mumbai would find such reception and shelter from Pakistan
These people are hellbent on projecting Pakistan as nothing more than a muslim version of India internationally and in the process shooting themselves in the foot (If Pakistan s Muslim version of India, then it's just the second India...Just like how Canada or Australia are poorer copies of USA, given that all of them are large off-shore White Anglo Protestant colonies away from Europe)