The Great Indian Bore

Exporting Our Bad Manners Since 1947

Every few months, some brave soul like Akash Banerjee sticks his neck out and states the bleeding obvious: we Indians are not exactly adored when we travel abroad.

Predictably, the national blood pressure shoots up. We thump our chests and scream “racism!” We blame colonial hangovers, Western arrogance, global prejudice—anything and everything except our own bloody awful manners. The truth is much simpler: we are, by and large, a nation of loud, entitled bores.

My own education in the art of the Indian tourist began in Thailand. I watched Thai vendors warmly welcoming pasty Australians, polite Japanese, and quiet Koreans. But the moment a loud group of my countrymen approached, the poor vendor would suddenly find an urgent, life-or-death need to rearrange his pineapples or talk to the wall.

This wasn’t racism; it was self-preservation.

The vendor knew exactly what was coming: a noisy, exhausting haggling match over a souvenir already priced lower than a cup of roadside chai back home. The Indian tourist doesn’t just want a bargain; he wants blood. He wants victory. If he can browbeat a vendor into dropping the price of a plastic elephant from a hundred baht to seventy, he returns to Delhi convinced he has single-handedly smashed international capitalism.

Go to Goa, and the comedy changes track. I have watched domestic tourists gawk at European sunbathers the way Victorian explorers stared at rare, multi-coloured baboons. The poor foreigner cannot even walk to a grocery shop without being cornered by a herd of men demanding “one photo, please.” No introduction, no polite “by your leave,” and absolutely no concept of consent. There is just a grand, delusional assumption that every white woman’s lifelong dream is to feature in a random Haryanvi boy’s family WhatsApp group.

Years ago, while reviewing Henna for the Broken-Hearted—a rather candid memoir by an Australian woman who made the mistake of marrying into our tribe—one line stuck with me. She noted with wry amusement that her husband’s friends simply refused to believe she was legally married to him. Worse, they assumed that because she was a white woman, she was automatically available for a roll in the hay with any man who walked by. We love to whine about how foreigners stereotype us, but we spend precious little time looking at the monstrous stereotypes we breed in our own backyards.

But why blame us for harassing foreigners? Our most exquisite lack of consideration is reserved strictly for our fellow Indians.

If you want to study the Indian psycho-demographic, skip the universities and board a train. Indian Railways is the world’s finest laboratory for human entitlement.

I once took a train from Kurukshetra to Delhi, having paid good money for a reserved berth. At Panipat, a gang of daily commuters stormed the compartment and instantly converted it into a raucous village square. Out came the playing cards, up went the decibels. An eight-seater compartment was suddenly squeezed to accommodate thirteen sweating bodies. Those of us who actually held valid tickets became irrelevant, intrusive details in their private party.

On another journey, a roving kirtan party decided our coach was a mobile temple. They whipped out cymbals and dholaks and began bellowing hymns at the top of their lungs. Apparently, spiritual salvation in India can only be achieved by ensuring that ninety other passengers lose their goddamn minds.

Just the other day, on the train from Goa to Udupi, I ran into a pack of pious pilgrims. By the time we crossed Madgaon, the holy shouting had begun. Mind you these were upward mobile jean clad young adults. They were the ISCKON bhajan loungers. Conversations were yelled from one end of the coach to the other. Tiffin boxes were unearthed, and home-packed breakfast was aggressively consumed. Naturally, the banana peels and oily paper cups found their way onto the floor or out the window. Cleanliness, you see, is always someone else’s karma.

But my absolute favourite specimen is the Dutiful North Indian Son.

This fellow boards the train carrying not just oversized VIP suitcases, but the absolute conviction that the entire railway network was built to accommodate his family’s domestic comfort. His old mother is in coach A, his wife is in coach B, and some stray aunt is tucked away in coach C. The computerized reservation system has made its decision, but the Dutiful Son has other ideas.

He launches a military campaign of seat re-allocation. He never asks; he commands. There is no “Would you mind?” or “Please.” He barks orders like a minor bureaucrat re-arranging office desks:

“Madam, you come here.”

“Uncle, move there.”

“Aap udhar baith jaiye.”

The comedy turns into farce when someone actually tells him to bugger off. Travelling alone over the years, I discovered a marvellous, foolproof antidote to these self-appointed station masters: a flat, icy refusal delivered in crisp, convent-educated English. The effect is instantaneous. The booming commander of coach B2 suddenly shrinks, mutters something about “ladies problem,” and retreats. The seat was never the issue; it was his inflated ego that couldn’t handle a bump.

Then come the smokers—the true martyrs of Indian entitlement. On one trip, a ticket examiner caught a man puffing away in the vestibule and told him to put it out. Was the man ashamed? Not a bit. Was his wife mortified? On the contrary, she flew into a magnificent rage—not at her rule-breaking husband, but at the ticket examiner! The logic was beautiful in its perversity: breaking the law is fine, but enforcing it is a direct insult to our dignity.

This is our great national affliction. Rules are wonderful things, provided they apply exclusively to our neighbours.

And so it goes on. The businessman shouting multi-crore corporate secrets into his mobile phone at public-announcement volume. The family matriarch giving hourly updates to Chachi and Mami over the phone about every single railway crossing. The teenagers watching loud, tinny videos without headphones. We treat public spaces like an extension of our own messy living rooms.

A hospitality trainer friend of mine once conducted workshops on basic etiquette. Mind you, she wasn’t teaching high-society, fork-and-knife aristocratic manners. She was teaching adults how to chew with their mouths shut, how to enter a car without trampling others, and how to exist in a shared space without being a public nuisance. The very fact that grown, bearded Indian adults require remedial training in basic human decency should make us hang our heads in shame.

The tragedy isn’t that we lack brains. The tragedy is that we have confused getting a degree with being civilised. Parents obsess over marks, schools obsess over ranks, coaching centers thrive on numbers. Nobody teaches character. Nobody teaches civic duty. Nobody teaches the simple truth that public space belongs to the man next to you just as much as it belongs to you.

The result? We have bred a generation of super-literate barbarians. They can solve multi-variable calculus, write flawless software code, debate global geopolitics, and quote the Upanishads from memory—yet they cannot stand in a straight queue, stop themselves from spitting on walls, or turn down the volume on their phones. We are producing highly qualified citizens who are utterly uncultivated.

And then, when these characters hit forty-five—fat, wealthy, and thoroughly exhausting to everyone around them—they suddenly discover Ikigai, mindfulness, or whatever trendy Japanese philosophy is being hawked by Western gurus this season.

It’s all very touching. But before we import zen and Japanese wisdom, we might want to try a far simpler, indigenous exercise: stop being a pain in the backside to the people around us.

The rest of the world would breathe a sigh of relief. And so, for God’s sake, would the rest of the train compartment.