General notion of the US in Indian households

My mother told me that my friend, who is an year senior to me, had gone to the US very recently to pursue higher studies. It seems that his mother told my mother that he did not study as "hard" as I did during his +1 and +2, but still ended up going to the US, and hence I need not have studied "hard". This shows that the notion in her mind is that going to US is the ultimate aim of every student and that if you are able to achieve it by simpler means then it is not worth putting in more effort. It was a similar response that I recieved my from my mother's elder sister, having "sent" both her sons to the US, when she came to know that I got an admission in IIT Madras. Even more aggressive was the response when I told her that me going to the US or any other country would depend on the field that I am going to specialise in and that if there are good professors in India who can guide me further in that field in Universities that have the required facilities, then the US or any other country would only be a secondary option for me. By saying this I presume that the very reason any body wants to pursue higher studies in the US, should be because there are not many colleges and Universities in India that can boast of facilities that are comparable to the ones that US Universities have in their field. There is nothing wrong in going abroad for higher studies if you stand to gain by education there and you help either "SCIENCE" or "INDIA" grow by doing it. My friend TJ's comments on this is another way of looking at it (will link it in another few days). But "Going to the US" should defy not be anybody's ultimate aim. This mindset of my friend's mother is, I think, prevalent among the majority of the population who's sons or daughters are in that age group. (The point is that I was awake on one particular night till about 2 a.m or so and his mother saw me "studying" through the window, and that's it, my mother was considered to be forcing me to study at odd times and that she was "torturing" me. Little did she realise that I was doing nothing more than writing an assignment to be submitted the next day at school and that I had slept for three hours as soon as I came from school)