It was a slim book called This Way Please. Its author was, I remember, Eleanor Boykin. We were schoolboys, easily influenced, eager to be influenced. The book, written in a lively, friendly style, offered lovely advice we would never use on public behaviour, with chapters like Learning to be at ease with people; Talk and popularity; Manners at the table; Rubbing elbows with the public; Good travellers; and Boys and girls.
We didn’t get to meet many girls, such were those times, and we were not frequent travellers, but we still loved Eleanor Boykin’s book, because we knew that anyone who behaved like that would be respected and admired. They would be seen as people of good manners, a phrase no one uses any more.
They would be people with civic sense.
That’s a phrase we’re suddenly hearing a lot of these days, mainly because Indians, it seems, don’t have much of it. I’ve been seeing the videos; so have you. They’re all over YouTube, Instagram and Reddit. They feature our brothers and sisters doing unspeakable, shameless things in distant countries in broad daylight.
Let’s talk about Bombai. Click the QR code above to join my WhatsApp group to share your Bombai stories for my book—and perhaps answer some of my Bombai questions.
One shows a London fire hydrant covered with streaks of paan, exactly like every lamp post in every Indian city. Another shows a raucous crowd of bare-chested Ganesh worshippers marching through Paris streets on their way to a visarjan in the Seine River. A third video shows a gaggle of Indian 30-somethings breaking out in a Bollywood bhangra dance in New York’s Times Square. They’d gone prepared to deafen, with amplifiers and boom bass speakers. It’s a small matter that they instantly drowned out the jazz quartet that had already been playing there.
The world, it seems, is watching uncouth India, newly rich, suddenly able to travel to cities that they had only seen before in Bollywood romances and thrillers. Their sloppiness and me-first behaviour are all over social media: eating wet food with their hands in a metro train, spitting, leaving a litter trail, breaking queues, talking loudly, treating waiters like lesser human beings, trying to leave the plane in a tearing hurry, and bargaining because it’s such fun to haggle, but never buy anything.
And groping women. In the last few years, Thailand has seen a spike in the number of Indians requiring bail after being arrested by Thai police — for molestation.
Don’t take my word for it. Watch YouTuber Raja Gujjar sidling up as close as he can to foreign women and showing off his unique harassment style to his 4 lakh followers. Bada neech admi hai tu, comments one of them with open admiration. Or watch him sprawled in a gondola in Venice, gesturing to a senora on a bridge to join him in the boat. Aa ja, rani, aa ja, idhar baith.
Watch YouTube’s Malik Swashbuckler, bald and creepy, walking next to a young woman in Turkey, telling her in Hindi, Kya maal hai tu! He was arrested and deported later.
No Indian school has classes on how to behave in public; civic sense is not taught anywhere. There is no equivalent of Eleanor Boykin’s This Way Please to guide our strutting, young, bearded hunks on how to be dignified, respectful, respectable human beings. As India Shining started to emerge from its woodwork as a growing economic powerhouse and a global leader — we also seem to be showing the world our current ‘culture’, with the crude moves of a juvenile delinquent.
Misbehaviour has become India’s top export.
Really? Is this us? I put the question to the community of my readers who have joined Bombai Stories, my WhatsApp group. (Use the QR code on this page to join.) An interesting insight came from reader Akar Gosrani —
“The people who travel in the local train are the same people who use the metro, yet they behave very differently in these two spaces. One environment offers zero space and treats the passenger with disdain, the other offers some amount of dignity, even if modest.
If the quality and design of our physical infrastructure is bad or non-existent, the civic sense will be similar.”
You’ve seen that: if an environment is spick and span, no one wants to be the first to litter. But if it’s already a dump, it’s pre-approved for littering.
Reader Cheryl A. said a minority of boorish Indians were giving the country a bad name, and that she had seen Americans spit, litter, and talk loudly too. But the question is not who else is a slob but why we are.
Children who watch their adults cut lights, spit from the car window, argue with officials, evade penalties with bribes, learn quickly: following rules is optional, especially if no one’s watching. Everything breaks down at once. Traffic lights are treated as suggestions. Rules become obstacles. Every regulation becomes a challenge to circumvent.
My auto was on an empty side road behind a lone motorcycle driving slowly, hugging the left kerb, but my driver kept honking till I asked him why.
“He will suddenly do something unexpected,” he said. “Like trying to cross over to the other side. I have to assume that. Honking a lot is to let him know I’m behind him.”
You can reach C Y Gopinath at cygopi@gmail.com
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.