Reader Johnny has been chewing the gristle off that old bone of contention as to what it is like living in a country with almost no hot women:

Sorry, I still have a horrified fascination with the SMV hellhole that India represents.

The question is, which man is it better to be?

a) A son of a prosperous Indian household, who might have a net worth of a few million dollars (which easily puts them into the top 1% of India, given the super-low wealth per capita there). He will never fuck any woman higher than a 6, will get married to a 6 he probably is not compatible with, and his wife will become obese after marriage like all the other Indian housewives.

OR

b) A broke white guy in the West who is a bartender. He never has much in the way of savings, but manages to fuck 8s and even 9s with some regularity.

Which man is it better to be?

He goes further and partly answers his own question:

Make that 0.1% of India, in a country where money still might get you the ‘best’ woman.

The thing is, the first guy is richer than 99.9% of the people who surround him, yet the best he can get is a 5 or 6. Even if he knew about Game and had Game (even though this is India), Game is not even useful in his environment.

By contrast, the second guy fucks a level of women unattainable to even rich indians, lives in a first world country, and more.

Which man is in the preferred position, of the two?

Well, seeing as this has been something of a bugbear of his for quite some time now, I’ll endeavour to answer it as best as I can.

I realise, by the way, that any Indian man reading this is going to be mortally offended – both by Johnny’s comments and by my likely answers. My answer to that is an almighty: “MEH”. While I don’t particularly seek to offend Indians with my observations, I am not going to hold back on them either. I’ll call it like I see it, and if that angers or offends people, well, too bad.

The truth stings. It hurts. It burns. Indians should be used to the sensation, given their tastes in food.

Right, so let’s get on to the answers to Johnny’s questions.

There are several pieces of his query that have to be answered. They are all related but discrete in and of themselves.

The first point pertains to the FACT that India is an absolute wasteland of a sexual market place. He’s absolutely right to point out that India is an SMP hellhole. It really is.

Going back to the choice posited, the second guy, the broke-ass bartender living in the West, is in a better position, undoubtedly – if you only look at the issue in the most narrow sense possible.

The bartender is going to be able to pull hot girls on a regular basis, and that is a good thing, at least from his point of view. Girls like this:

(That is actually a Filipina model named Maica Paolo. She easily qualifies as a high 8 if not an outright 9.)

Compared to that, even most wealthy Indian men are kind of in a shitty situation.

Let’s take a look at some of the women who are considered to be among India’s most beautiful and desirable women. Since we are talking about India, the women under discussion are entirely from Bollywood or similar backgrounds.

This is Anoushka Sharma, age 31. She is married to Virat Kohli, captain of India’s national cricket team:

This is Priyanka Chopra, a Bollywood actress aged about 37 who managed to cross over into American television and even cinema, who is married to one of the Jonas brothers:

This is Katrina Kaif, a 36-year-old British actress of Indian origin who works almost entirely in Bollywood:

This is Sonam Kapoor Ahuja, married to one of India’s leading shoe designers and a famous Bollywood starlet in her own right, age 34:

(Full disclosure: we attended the same school for a few years. She was significantly fatter back then. I do not know her personally and do not care to. We ran in very different circles back then.)

And here is Deepika Padukone, age 33, married to one of Bollywood’s most famous and in-demand actors of the moment, Ranveer Singh – you may remember him from that AMAZEBALLS music video featuring Peshwa and Maratha warriors jumping around in kilts:

I hope this puts things into perspective. THAT IS AS GOOD AS IT GETS IN INDIA.

Of these five women, precisely ONE could even reasonably be considered a 9 in terms of her looks. Hint: it’s the one who wasn’t born in India.

The rest of the ladies up there are, at best, 7s and 8s, and that is with extensive Photoshopping, a hell of a lot of makeup, and the very best of lighting and the most flattering angles.

Now, this isn’t the first time that I’ve embarked on a diatribe about Indian women. The last time I did it, I provided examples of a Russian model named Maria Sokolovski dressed in various saris to illustrate just how huge the gulf is between top-shelf Eastern European beauty and Indian equivalents.

The problem is that this is like comparing oranges to… well, durians. Even the average Russian girl that you see on the Moscow metro will look like she is practically from a different species than the average Indian girl on the streets of Bombay, Calcutta, Hyderabad, or Delhi.

A much better comparison is between actresses and women of similar ethnicities who were born and brought up in different cultures.

So, just for shits and giggles, let me do what I once did several years ago and compare these Bollywood luminaries with one of their own:

One more for clarity’s sake:

This perfectly illustrates the scale of the problem.

Sunny Leone is 38. She used to be a porn actress – which is why, if you search for her, keep the SafeSearch ON. She has had sex on camera for money with dozens if not hundreds of men and women. Even though she is happily married and has been for years, she is the living walking definition of a slore.

And she’s still better looking than most of Bollywood’s hottest starlets who are several years or even a decade younger.

(I was walking through an airport quite recently and saw her face all over posters advertising, and I’m not making this up, “Manforce” vanilla-strawberry flavoured condoms. You know that old saying about how a leopard can’t change its spots? In India, at least, a porn star can’t stop selling sex. True story, bro.)

I realise that I am belabouring the point here, but you can see why. Despite the protestations of the average Indian man, India truly is an absolute wasteland for beautiful women. You can spend hours walking through some of its biggest tourist attractions, like the Taj Mahal in Agra, or the Golconda Fort in Hyderabad, and you will see not one single attractive woman – by which I mean, at least a 7.

The answer to Johnny’s question is that the bartender is in the better position – IF those are the only alternatives available and if we’re only judging on the extremely superficial basis of having sex with women.

But that is not all there is to the answer.

First, the broke bartender living in a large American or European or Australian city isn’t really living in the First World, not anymore.

If he is living in, say, New York F***ing City, or Portland, or Austin, or Seattle, or Los Angeles, or San Francisco, he is in fact living in a place rapidly reverting to below Dirt World status. (Austin is perhaps the lone exception – and even then, 7th St East in Austin is not a nice place to be after dark, and it’s just a block or two away from the main road of the town.)

He is in fact living in a city that is rapidly reverting to Mediaeval living standards, where death stalks the streets in the form of typhus and cholera and even bubonic plague. These are diseases that the West supposedly eradicated decades ago, and yet they are making a big comeback in those cities.

If he is living in a big Western European city like London, Paris, Madrid, Brussels, Frankfurt, Stockholm, Oslo, or Helsinki, he isn’t really living in a Western city either. Those cities have their attractions and they are wonderful places to live, but London and Paris, in particular, are severely cucked out.

Wealthy Indians in the Dirt World have to deal with a lot of problems. Their infrastructure is shitty. Their public services are pretty much non-existent. Their country is smog-covered, polluted, overcrowded, extremely noisy, and anywhere from ridiculously to unbearably hot for 75% of the year.

But wealthy Indians generally live very secluded and segregated lives away from the masses in air-conditioned gated communities, with their own chauffeurs, maids, and cleaning staff. They have direct access to some of the best medical technology available, at prices far below that which Westerners have to pay. They can travel and go pretty much wherever they like, sneering at the hoi-polloi along the way and sniggering about what a bunch of bumbling thieving louts Indians are – while actingprecisely like their less fortunate countrymen at every opportunity when overseas in nicer places.

And, most importantly, wealthy Indians still live in a place that is recognisably their own country

The other point that Johnny misses, by a mile, is that, in reality, it is not good to be EITHER of those guys.

The broke bartender banging sloots every Thursday through Saturday night is not improving himself. He is not building anything of value for the future. He is spending his money primarily on just staying alive – on rent, utilities, and the cheapest groceries. He is not building up any savings or transferable skills. He is entirely dependent upon his job and possibly social welfare payments to stay alive.

This is not a high-quality man.

This is not the kind of man who will become driven and desired, and who will be able to transition from having fun but ultimately meaningless sex with a lot of women, to becoming a pillar of his society and a warrior for Western civilisation. This is not the kind of man who is going to become a husband and a father. Doing so requires creating a stable base of savings and assets upon which to build a home and family.

Eventually, every player gets tired of the game and wants to move on. This is true without exception. There is only so much thrill and joy that can come from banging a hot new girl every week – or every night, in some cases. After a while, every pussy begins to look pretty much the same, and every poon-hound engaged in that sort of constant fornication begins to wonder if there is anything better.

It must never be forgotten that sex between a man and a woman results in a man giving part of his soul to the woman, and a woman giving a MUCH larger part of her soul to the man. Eventually, every player, no matter how hardened, no matter how jaded, runs out of the ability to give up any more of himself.

It is at that point that a man needs to find some greater purpose in life. And if he is nothing much more than a broke bartender with no other significant aspirations in life… well, he doesn’t have much of anything to fall back upon.

Which brings us to the wealthy Indian guy’s case.

The wealthy Indian guy who relies on his parents to choose his bride for him, never goes to the gym, never tries to sample new foods and different cultures, is like a blind man being asked to describe the colour green. He doesn’t understand that anything else exists outside of his limited view of the world.

His marriage may well be far more stable than that of a Western counterpart. Westerners might find the idea of arranged marriage anywhere from bizarre to abhorrent. I share those views, but I also acknowledge the hard fact that arranged marriages tend to succeed and stay stable far more than “love marriages”, as it were, because when a marriage is arranged between two families, a whole bunch of factors well beyond mere individual compatibility have to be accounted for. And those factors do add up to a more happy and stable long-term marriage.

But the wealthy Indian dude will have one huge advantage that the broke bartender never will.

He has the resources and the ability, if he chooses to use it, to go abroad and seek better opportunities for himself. All he has to do is put in a bit of effort. All he needs is to hit the gym a few times a week and earn some muscles. All he must do is get a decent wardrobe of good well-fitting stylish clothes that show that he has some fashion sense. All he requires is to travel the world a bit and gain some perspective.

If he really wants to put in the work, he can take elocution lessons to fix the extremely nerdy-sounding Indian accent.

Look, Indians KNOW that the accent sounds ridiculous to Western ears. They know perfectly well that it is a highly “uncool” accent. That is why most of them try to modify it, either consciously or otherwise, over time when they go to the West. Unfortunately, most of them do a terrible job of it, so they end up sounding halfway between Western and Indian, and thereby absurd.

But, it can be done with conscious effort. A well-educated Indian who puts in the effort can end up sounding a bit like the liberal Indian politician Shashi Tharoor – who, not at all coincidentally, was married to a Canadian woman for some time.

As you can see, the wealthy Indian doesn’t need to do all that much to separate himself from the crowd and do much, much better than his compatriots and, indeed, better than most Western men will be able to manage.

He only needs to do just enough to separate himself from the hordes of white neckbeards and Gamma males in the West, and the even greater hordes of Indian creepers, mama’s boys, and pot-bellied mustachioed losers and dorks who stand around staring uncomfortably at every white Western woman who comes to an Indian city.

He has to change himself and become more Westernised if he wants to score with non-Indian women. That is simply a fact of life. But unlike the broke bartender, he has the ability to do it – if not perhaps the willpower.

And that is why, in my response to Johnny’s original comment, I pointed out that his choice was a false dichotomy. The answer he provided only makes sense in a purely binary heuristic sense where you consider everything purely in terms of banging hot women “as-is”, in a system in stasis.

In economics, this is known as the “Ricardian Vice”, where you freeze all other variables in place and consider only one or two moving pieces in a system. But this is not the world we actually live in. And the moment that you begin to let things move as they naturally should, you begin to realise that there is no need to think in such purely restricted terms.

So, no, Johnny, it is not true that man (a) will never “bang” any women above a 6. He could, if he only put in the time and effort to learn how to do it. And he could, if he so desired, go much further in his life because he has the ability and the resources to go places and do things that 99.9% of his countrymen will never experience.

And no, it is not true that man (b) will be able to “bang” 8s and even 9s with some regularity. He’ll be able to do that for a while. But sooner or later, he will tire of this and the quality women that he actually wants and indeed needs to be with, will ignore him because he adds nothing of value to their lives.

It is a false dichotomy. Life is what you make of it, whether you are a Westerner or an Indian or a Chinese Singaporean or a South American or a Martian. You take the opportunities that you are given. You improve yourself where you can. You become the best version of yourself that you can be. And you learn from your mistakes.

Most men will never do these things, no matter how mean or great their origins. Those few that do, will achieve things in their lives that separate them from the pack.

Some of them might even bend the knee and declare Jesus Christ as Lord and King – at which point their appetite for banging 8s and 9s every week will simply crater, because they will want to create a stable and happy family with one woman and will not necessarily mind “settling” for a 7 who can cook, clean, maintain house, and doesn’t come with a hundredweight of neuroses and hangups and drama, the way her prettier sisters almost always do.

As always, the question is not “Is it better to be man (a) or man (b)?”

The question actually is: “Are you the best man that you can be?”

If the answer is no – and for just about every single one of you, it is certainly “no” – then you need to make some changes.

You can make a good start by listening to my podcast, uploaded every week on Sunday evenings. Pull up a nice comfy chair, pour yourself a fine single-malt Scotch – which by the way you’re not going to be able to afford much of on a broke bartender’s wages – and listen to the dulcet tones of yer very ‘eavy, very ‘umble servant Didact as he tells you how to go about becoming a better man.