TL; DR It's a crazy place. But they speak English. You can go for 3 months for $2000 including flight and 3 months of hotels and restaurants. You're sitting with your dick in one hand and a microwave burrito in the other. You get on that fucking plane and your life will never be the same.

I wrote a response to someone in asktrp asking what he could do to not be such a boring person. He said his life consists of sitting in front of his computer, video games, microwaving hot pockets, and working a dead-end retail job. And fapping.

My idea for him was to go to India for 3 months. And I would recommend it to anyone who has an issue with life going nowhere. It is a bit of a cliché to travel through India after a crisis. But it's a cliché because it works. In the old days, you might have been able to go to Europe, but Europe is quite expensive these days, and to be honest, it's not really much of an escape from the Anglo-Saxon global consumerist world any more.

Here's why India is a good plan:

  1. It's affordable to do for 3 months. If you have even a minimum wage job, or slightly above, you just need to save up $2000. You should already have that if you work or be able to save it by cutting out bullshit for 2-3 months. You can get to India for about $1000, then live there for $300/month. Yes, it's that cheap. Price have gone up slightly since when I was there in 2006. But I lived very well, better than I ever had, for $250/month. That includes a hotel every night. 3 meals a day at restaurants. (Meals can cost between $0.80 and $1.50 - hard to believe but true. I'm talking full meals with a starter and a drink.) And traveling by train across the entire country, which is as big as a continent. You can get from one corner of the country to another for about $25 on a second-class train ticket.

  2. You cannot help but have adventures every day, which will improve your SMV by helping you deal with the unexpected, and furthermore have interesting stories to tell. When you're somewhere that exotic, everything is an adventure. Ordering a meal in an Indian restaurant. Walking down the street. Taking a second-class train on a 40-hour ride across southern India. You cannot do any of these things without gaining some new experience. Then, further adventures will surely come your way. On my very first day in India, my gf and I were asked to participate in a Bollywood movie. We didn't know whether it was legit or not, so we decided to take a shot. The owner of our hotel had recommended us (because we were white and they needed to shoot a scene "in London" with white people. I'm sure the hotel owner got a kickback for pimping out his guests, but whatever, why not.) So, we got on a van to a studio on the outskirts of Mumbai and shot a scene in a Bollywood movie. A year later, I found the DVD and saw myself in a crowd scene. How much of an awesome adventure to be doing that, and how cool to let slip off your tongue, if you have no other accomplishments in life, that your face appears in a Bollywood movie. And I got paid to do it. About $10, but that was more than a whole day's budget for hotel and meals.

  3. You will probably lose that pathetic fat you have from sitting on your ass. You might get sick. I had low-level stomach irritation for 2 of the 4 months I was there. But I lost 45 pounds and had a visible 6-pack for the first time in my adult life. On the other hand, hopefully you won't get sick, but you will eat more vegetarian food, spicy food, and natural food products instead of your damn Hot Pockets. Which is what you are turning into!

  4. You will turn more Red Pill in the sense of gaining true perspective. You will see families of 6 sleeping on a blanket on the sidewalk. You will stop whining like a bitch that your cable signal is lagging. You will see skeletal cows walking through the streets and bodies burning in the Ganges and you will see that you only have one life and your pathetic self sitting night after night in front of a video of a BBC plowing a 19 year-old slut while you drool and touch yourself is an offense to YOURSELF.

  5. Furthermore, you can't even find porn in India. When I went, I had a friend who asked me to bring an Indian porn magazine back for him as a souvenir. So I went into press shops now and then for 4 months. Couldn't find Indian Playboy or Indian Hustler. Now, I'm sure they exist somewhere underground, and obviously some Indians have uploaded some porn online, but it also clears your mind when you see a whole culture that despite a very large segment being uneducated and impoverished, understands enough of human nature and dignity to not put up disgusting sex filth for perverted, lazy minds up for sale just because they have the freedom to do so. In many ways, you will learn how uncultured our advanced Western civilization is.

  6. On the other hand, you will see things Indians don't do particularly well, such as civic cleanliness. There is trash everywhere. You will gain a respect for the cleanliness standards of your home country. It might give you a little respect for authority realizing that civilization doesn't happen automatically on its own. You are part of civilization when you have self-respect and demand respect from others. And even if you don't agree with my take, you will certainly form some opinion that will make you a less boring person.

It's a sacrifice. I'm asking for 3 months of your life. And $2000 of your cash.

But is it any worse than getting a Master's degree for 2 years and $80,000? Depending where you are in life, going to India may bring more value to your life and self-worth than any education degree.

It is a short-cut. It's not the full deal of what you need if you're 25 or 30 and still a boring person. But if you left today, you could be back home by June telling girls at a bar about that crazy beach in India where you swam with dolphins. You will sound like a jet-setter, but the entire experience cost less than what a sorority girl spends on Frappuccinos in a year.

Make the lightest plan possible. Don't stay in one city. Tell yourself: 1 week in Mumbai to get settled in and take it all in. Then take a train somewhere far. Rajastan. Delhi. Calcutta (I loved Calcutta.) Kerala. Tamil Nadu.

When I was in Tamil Nadu, a man got beheaded on the street for looking at another guy's girlfriend. Wouldn't you like to tell a story like that?

Don't go to Goa. It's a hippie colonial outpost and you're just gonna smoke weed. But even if you do that, it's better to smoke weed on a beach in Goa with a bunch of burnt out hippies than to do it in your bedroom waiting for your fucking HotPocket to cool down!

And then, who knows. Maybe you'll run into some awesome chick over there who's your new plate, your next LTR.

Something is gonna happen. Because you're gonna step out from the airplane into that hot India air with nothing but a return ticket 3 months later and you're gonna be forced to do something interesting.

EDIT: There seems to be some confusion and people are piggybacking in the comments giving advice that is derailing the point of this post. It's not about going somewhere that is FUN. If that was my point, I would have said, Go to Cancun during Spring Break! Woo! The point is that India is a chaotic, challenging place. Moreso than Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, or Vietnam. I'm not recommending a fun vacation. I'm recommending a place that will challenge you physically, mentally, and spiritually. And you will get a quick injection of significant life experience. I.e. I saw a man in Darjeeling that had a head, neck and boneless legs, but no body. I can't even explain it. But I know what I saw. You see more shit like that in India than anywhere else I can think of. A ladyboy bar in Bangkok does not compare.

2ND EDIT: As a commenter mentioned, travel to India requires a visa. And, I will add, immunization. So plan on another $100-$200 for that. And you need to plan at least a few weeks in advance unless you want to pay a rush fee for your visa. That said, you can still be out of your life and in FUCKING INDIA by the end of this month if you want to. Or you could fap and fall asleep with your own cum pooling in your belly button again.