The Ugly Indian

Yes, the metro Indian can be quite ugly, and not only in airplane cabins and at airports. He is ugly in his SUV, he is ugly in a restaurant, at the shopping mall, in a cinema 'multiplex', at the bank, as a tourist, with his colleagues. And he is just as likely to be an ugly she.

The new, thirtyish, well-salaried urban Indian is as crass as they come. The streets of Mumbai (still 'Bombay' to the forty-plus and above) are a stage for such ugliness, for it is in their new cars that these Indians are at their ugliest. For them, pedestrians are the untermenschen, and have no place on city roads. For it is on city roads (town roads too, for the proletkult of the Indian auto has spread far and fast) that the ugliness can find full fearsome expression. There are to be no rules, no orderliness and no civic courtesies for the ugly Indian, for he can either blast right through them, or buy away their interference. What matters is the zip and flash of automobile swagger.

And so it is that the new car, the new phone, the new vacation (we used to call it a 'holiday', until the new marketers stepped in), the new career and the new confidence are what defines the new Indian. The 'new rude traveler' that Jason Overdorf describes is a representative of a far bigger, far more destructive social disease. This explosive blight, which has outsped H1N1 many times over, is now recognised by travellers in airports around the world. The economically-empowered Indian, his ugliness endorsed by an accordion-album of credit cards, has shoved aside the American and the Chinese and barged his way to the rudeness front. For him, domination begins with low-grade thuggery. If my rupee can't buy it, it can't be worth it.

In the early 2000s, as a resident in South-East Asia, I would find myself affronted by the quick tendency of travelling Chinese to crowd all others out, loudly and inconsiderately. What would happen, I had wondered then, if the nascent new Indian took this as a challenge? No, it couldn't be, I reasoned, for our cultural shyness and reputation for frugality could not allow such degradation. How utterly wrong I was. The rowdy Chinese and the self-inflated American were but the beta versions of the unutterably ugly Indian, who has swept away all challengers.

Is there any remedy? A recession, if we're lucky.

Yours sincerely, Rahul Goswami

makanaka@pobox.com
Goa, India : +91 9833471884
Berlin, Germany : +49 170 7409520/+49 30 3045463

First of all the title of this is absolute rubbish. There are problems everywhere, every country, every place. Cultures are different.I don't understand why you are so pissed off with this.
Indian are still one of the best citizens in the world.
You can simply see the atttude,upbringing, rudeness of westeren world and then analyze.I don't think any other country can work and survive with this much diversity from language to food to skin to culture to caste to religion.You can not generalise the culture of a country which has population more than 1 billion based on 10-12 people.There is a history of barbarianism of western world.
Ofcourse there are problem and things are changing mostly because of westernisation.There are problems because of gap in rich and poor and change in the gap is causing more problems but it is still much better than most of the countries.

I agree that the US is fast losing its monopoly on obnoxiousness to the Indian yuppie. My experience flying with fellow-Indians has been more mixed than Overdorf's observation of unrelieved nastiness... behavior ranges between obsequious timidity to overbearing obnoxiousness, both equally exasperating. Overdorf's broad strokes are of course grating... but there is little about the brash indian yuppie that inspires any attempt to defend him (it is a gendered thing). I've seen men in dress pants, flip-flops and nicotine stained mustaches bring flight attendants to tears with their bad behavior... members of parliament refusing to show ID and threatening ground staff into issuing them boarding passes... and of course the iconic whisky guzzler whose smallest crime is a constitutional aversion to saying "thanks" or simply being nice.

There is something unique about the Indian brand of racism where it seems quite alright to refer to Indians from the north east as "chinks" or worse "chinese"... the hatred and distrust of muslims is almost customary... and residential segregation (based on ethnicity) is just as bad if not worse than New York City. Callousness, thoughtlessness and a disregard for fellow-humans is written into the very architecture of Indian cities where pedestrian spaces are taken over by roads full of cars that blithely dismantle rearview mirrors (apparently the whole point of driving is to get ahead and honk the hell out of anyone in the way!). The entire stretch of the 8 lane road that connects Bangalore to the new privately owned airport is without pedestrian infrastructure... in the first week of is operation there were 75 deaths on this road while people either fulminated about the inconvenience of driving 50 kilometers or raved about how "modern" the new airport was. The new airport struck me as insufferably hideous... a blue box in the middle of nowhere. Neat and efficient but hideous with misspelled advertising for IIT tuition and Australian MBA programs. But I digress.

There are too many attempts to justify and normalize the all too visible cruelty and indifference in everyday life in India... blame "tradition", blame "pre-modern" sentiments or blame capitalism, blame modernization, blame the colonial disruption of some mythical indigenous history.

It is indeed a "cultural thing"... As "culture" becomes the preserve of corporate consultants intent of managing "organizational culture," the humanities in Indian universities have become handmaidens to the outsourcing industry's demands for an army of what Geeta Seshu has called "midnight coolies". The only other discourse on "culture" is monopolized by the fundamentalist and not-so fundamentalist Hindu nationalist. Of course, there is the weird confluence of libertarian and leftist critiques of modernization in particular and western modernity at large. All this has created a vacuum of discourses on what Indians need to do in order to practice a more cosmopolitan sense of the world.

Overdorf is mostly quite astute in his critique... except he lets a lopsided (and racist) EU immigration regime off the hook. To overlook the fact that the EU affords certain passports mobility while restricting others in order to paint his picture of the ugly indian traveler is disingenuous at best. The fact that most North Atlantic passport holders get a free pass into European hotels while others get the privilege of spending the night in transit lobbies might simply seem like an innocuous consequence of the way the rules are set up. It might not be the kind of crude biological racism that segregates and violates based on phenotype (something that (post)Hansonite Australians seem to have monopoly on)... but racism it is! A state sanctioned racism that too. Racism is not simply what some people in hats do to some people in turbans... it is a structure of rationality that pervades modern law and notions of sovereignty. Travel, across borders then becomes a space where these not so latent rationalities ignite.

Looked at in a slightly less hyperventilated context then, an irascible turbaned gent's impolite demand for whisky might be at least secondary to those of us concerned with civility and niceness.