The American Dream || Acharya Prashant

Added: 2026-05-21

[00:00:00]So you're a kid, right? You are given an image to pursue. That image shows you enjoying life in the states, [music] United States, right? A villa of your own, two nice cars, two cute kids, light-skinned wife, such thing. And where does that image come from? That image comes from a deep-rooted fear, deep-rooted. Somehow I want to feel secure, and I'm told I'll be secure when I'll have X thousand dollars in my account, a new passport, a green card, or something, social security, this, that. The US has been attractive since so many decades.

[00:00:33]We went there. Now Indian students are going to China. That's the emerging superpower. Schools are teaching Mandarin. Soon the English speakers will be considered uh obsolete chaps, colonial era remnants.

[00:00:44]Mandarin is cool, like K-pop. Go with the flow. That's the social message. If you reach there, you are good, you're doing well, you are successful. But life is not that. That may actually never be achieved, and one does not know what happens if at all that is achieved. We have a certain ambition for that. Even that is just ambition, nothing more than that. But towards all this, which really is life, we have no affection at all.