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I cannot say too much about this because, in truth, there are far too many issues to be discussed in what you just posted, so I will limit my response to saying just what culture means to me.
Culture is and means alot of things to entire nations and each individual person. In your post, you mentioned India and some of the behaviors in that country. To me, that is a form national culture, which defines or describes the behaviors of a society within a country or multiple countries with similar/related cultures. That type of culture defines social norms that individuals in a country or region follow and allows individuals in that area to identify themselves with their country and helps them understand their place withing their society and in the world, the values they will follow, and form of life they will live.
However, as you might already know, when people migrate, they take with them their beliefs, their culture. What happens with this migrants is that when they find themselves within a new society, they suffer what is known as "culture shock." I believe this is what happened to you when you found yourself in a country you probably had never been to before or had no prior knowledge about their society; you realized how different people see the world and life. But that is only what happens at an individual level. When many migrants gather together in a community outside their original region/country (which they do to help each other find their place in a new environment), what will eventually happen is that said community will adapt by adopting behaviors and traditions typical to their new home, eventually creating a brand-new culture that is a mixture of their old culture and the one they find themselves in. Change is a constant in life, and this is a way of adapting to your environment. Culture is a guide that helps you navigate the world you are born in, but when you face a new world(society), what you knew before may not help you at all and you become lost. You will find yourself in the need to rearrange your form of thinking in order to accomodate and understand your new environment.
For example, Asian, Latins, and European communities in the US share many similarities with their native counterparts, but they are, at the same time, very different, perhaps even vastly different, than people from their original countries. The difference becomes even greater as new generations are born. This communities develop a culture all their own, apart from those of their origins and perhaps not fully part of the mainstread American culture. To put it in a certain way, they become "Americanized" (which is a term that I have heard other people use before in some way or another), but it doens't neccesarily mean that they have becomed American.
Another quick example is that American Jews are different from European Jews and Middle Eastern Jews. Although by culture they are Jews, their culture is mix of the beliefs common to all Jews and typical to the regions they live in.
Culture, again, is a way of understanding your place in the world, of forming your identity and knowing who you are. You and I could be living in the same country, and our cultural backgrounds could be different, and so would our beliefs.
That's what culture is to me. I don't have time to type anything else, but I would love to continue this discussion some other time, when work doesn't make my daily schedule so tight.
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