imagine if they went communist like the Chinese did

They were Soviet Aligned for most of the Cold War. But the division between Hindus and Muslims eventually created a wedge that western capital could leverage to break the leftist tendencies of the earlier governments, ending with Chaudhary Charan Singh. By the 80s, they'd begun a full transition to neoliberal governance.

iirc kerala is pretty cool, they regularly elect marxist communists and while it's not a socialist state by any means, they've done good things working in the confines of the liberal framework with stuff like the highest minimum wage in india and a strong protest scene

this is like saying europe is a shithole because europeans in america shoot up schools

whites try to know anything about the world at all (challenge impossible ik)

also 3 of those top 13 cities are european and one of them's even in italy lmfao (despite having 80x the GDP)

Are you asking this from the point a tourist? Or generally in terms of the direction the country is headed in?

If you wanna travel then I don't good advice but Kerala and the Himalayas are very beautiful, though the latter spills over to Nepal.

For the other question I would say the outlook id overall pessimistic.

while we're asking questions where can I find a historical materialist examination of the whole Operation Blue Star incident and the leadup to it.