I am an Indian and I have noticed that Indians are way too proud of their country for some reason and at the same time lack any civic sense towards it, they are extremely loud and extremely proud. We feel like the world revolves around India and our culture is superior to that of others. Also, a considerable chunk of the population has been sold the “India is a world-leader” myth and they think India is somehow leading the world in innovation, science and technology, human development etc.,
Now, I know for a fact that this is not true, when I try to gauge the perception of Indians abroad on Twitter, I get pretty negative results, but Twitter has nothing good to say about any group of people, so… I kinda wanted to know what you people though of India, don’t base it upon the etnic Indians who might be your friends and are decent people, but base it upon the news you read, the stories you hear from those Indians, etc.
It was the loudest and smelliest country I’ve ever been to.
I’ve never seen a country where the cross-country sleeper train bathrooms had literal holes on the floor to shit and piss out of. You saw the tracks wizz below you from the toilets. No plumbing, just excrete onto the tracks.
Chennai train station had the strongest most overwhelming diarrhea smell I ever experienced in my entire life.
Dudes were creepy as hell. They see you’re white and then you’re swarmed everywhere you go. People trying to scam, trying to appoint themselves as your tour guide and won’t stop following you and trying to guide you to “the mall”. Calling you Harry Potter because you wear glasses. I couldn’t imagine what would happen if I was a woman there. I shudder to think.
Crossing the street means walking into oncoming traffic and hoping and trusting everyone to just drive around you. Absolute fucking chaos. The people are not warm or friendly. They stare and get too close and touch you all the time. I kept having people touch my shoulders and try and touch my face when I was in public or queuing.
I never ever want to return to India ever again. I don’t recommend any of my friends go there. There were very few positives about that trip other than it being an eye opening experience as to how over 1 billion humans on the planet live.
They stare and get too close and touch you all the time. I kept having people touch my shoulders and try and touch my face when I was in public or queuing
This is more of a culture thing, I used to do it a lot when I was younger (it’s considered friendly)
Thank you for being genuinely interested in the opinion of others and for explaining culture differences.
To someone from my culture and to me when I was there, I hated it. It felt the absolute opposite of friendly. It felt predatory. I didn’t feel safe, I felt uncomfortable, I felt I was a freak and an oddity and it made me embarrassed to go anywhere. And this was with Indian-American guides who were familiar with which places to go to and which to avoid for tourists.
I say this to you with no disrespect to you as a person. I’m just trying to state things without sugarcoating them. I appreciate you explaining the cultural perception.
It felt predatory. I didn’t feel safe, I felt uncomfortable, I felt I was a freak and an oddity
I feel no connection to this culture whatsoever, I would happily follow your cultural norms if ever am lucky enough to visit the West, so you are not offending me, and I appreciate the honestly too :)
Train toilets dumping directly on the tracks isn’t excessively unusual, we still have trains here in Austria that do that although it is definitely being phased out.
At a risk of downvote oblivion, this is what comes to mind to me. Keep in mind that this is just what I perceive about India through all the media I’ve consumed so it can come across as a bit prejudiced. I’m sure there’s more nuance.
The good:
- Amazing food, rich culture
- Seemingly big into tech.
- Very colorful.
- People seem generally friendly.
The bad:
- So. Insanely. Chaotic.
- Basic sanitation and infrastructure seem stuck a few decades ago.
- Female emancipation is lacking as far as I can gather.
- A lot of inequality in general.
- The weather seems like hell to me.
- Even though they’re big into tech, it comes across to me that the government and general population is still stuck in the mid 90’s regarding devices (pc’s etc, smartphones excluded).
The things that come to my mind are
-The country has a set goal to improve in tech industry, aiming to rival big countries like China.
-The people definetly know their spices. While they use it a bit too much at times, it certainly works well.
-The country is overpopulated, leading to talented people having harder time to succeed.
-If you’re watching an Indian man’s tutorial on any topic, you can assume it’ll work well.
-It has a noticable split in religious beliefs.
-fuck the remote scammers operating from Kolkata. The people in India also hate these people.
Can second the comment about tutorials. It’s amazing how your very very specific problem has a great tutorial, with the worst possible audio, that is perfectly solved by some random dude in his bedroom in India.
Can second the comment about tutorials. It’s amazing how your very very specific problem has a great tutorial, with the worst possible audio, that is perfectly solved by some random dude in his bedroom in India.
- Fizz ( @Fizz@lemmy.nz ) 24•3 months ago
I know India has a booming tech sector and produces tons of great engineers which is cool. I hate their scam call centers its disgusting.
I’ve never been but I’ve seen traveling vlogs and the news and it looks so unbelievably polluted and gross. With all the money and education I would expect basic infrastructure to be in every city. The country still has a lot of natural beauty and historical sites well preserved, big respect for that.
As for generalizations about the people. I see a lot of videos of indians mobbing and doing crazy acts. When they are abroad they tend to mostly interact with other indians and shut others out but generally follow the law and arent violent. Women’s rights are pretty awful. Sellers are too pushy.
In general my perception of Indians normally comes from the ones I’ve met who grew up in New Zealand and I have a good perception of them. When I have to exclude that and only think of India as a country my perception is very negative.
interestingly, almost everyone in the comments have been as calm headed and rational as you. There is not one emotionally charged reply which is devoid of real answers. This is pretty good!
- Biggest democracy in the world
- Wouldn’t consider it a world leader, to me it often seems more like they refuse to take a clear stance in world affairs, so they can continue positive relations with authoritarian countries like Russia
- Rapid development, but still a lot of extreme poverty and inequality
- Chaotic cities
- Great food, especially for vegetarians like me
- Religious extremism/conflicts seem prevalent
- intensely_human ( @intensely_human@lemm.ee ) 22•3 months ago
India gets my respect for its very long history, and the fact it invented buddhism.
But Indian code is terrible. It degrades my respect for the country because it’s just consistently really bad.
A lot of Indian code seems like someone tried to fix a broken car window by caulking a fish tank into place. You confront them and they’re like “What? It’s glass isn’t it? It’s exactly the same”
Now I haven’t seen a lot of Indian code. I’ve seen the output of maybe ten different devs in India, and of that sample it’s all bad. Like really bad.
They work hard and get shit done, but it’s always some kind of hacky kluge made from copy-pasted code.
It’s unclean. It’s full of tech debt. It’s redundant. It’s often not even indented correctly.
Western countries employing Indian coders are generally looking for the cheapest coders they can find who speak passable English. All of that sounds like you got what you paid for.
Yep and when they pay for better they tend to ship the engineer to their base of operations. Huge brain drain.
- intensely_human ( @intensely_human@lemm.ee ) 4•3 months ago
It’s probably true that the examples I’m thinking of were all from that general notion. The attitude of “We’re going to India to get this done cheap.”
Like any place, there are pros and cons, and since I’ve never visited, I haven’t been exposed to enough to form a proper opinion. However, here are some of my thoughts:
- The culture seems to appreciate intricacy and beauty, with rich colors, complex spicing of food, and gorgeously detailed textiles. Minimalism seems anathema on an aesthetic level.
- The Indians I’ve known have mostly been very warm, kind, patient, pragmatic people.
- There is a worrying divide between the sexes, which IMO is unhealthy and contributes to sexism, sexual assault, and loneliness. I don’t get it because you guys invented the kama sutra!
- I’m not sure why this is, but there seems to be a huge tolerance of unsanitary conditions. We’ve all seen footage of people wading in horribly polluted rivers, or beachfronts covered in trash and human poop, or filthy public bathrooms covered in feces or period blood. Same goes for unsafe conditions - massively overloaded trains, deadly chaotic traffic, etc.
- It seems to me that it must be hard to get ahead in a country with so many people because there’s a massive amount of competition, plus limited opportunities. I think this is why Indians are some of the hardest working people I’ve ever met, and also why some of the Indians I’ve known are willing to undercut the next guy to get ahead.
- large
- tap water can be dirty
- great curry
- massive population
- caste system
- makes many YouTube tutorials
- has some beef with Pakistan
- likes to bob their heads
- arranged marriages
- spices
- really hot and humid
- as other people have mentioned, can be a bit unruly at times
- exceptional food
- cheap workforce (the next major factory of world after China is becoming “too expensive” and competitive)
- hinduism
- religious segration
- caste system
- extreme poverty and extreme wealth
- racist towards dark skinned people (also due to caste)
- anti-queer
- lots of potential, but also among world leaders in corruption
- hot
- noisy, polluted cities
- very influenced by external forces
I’d like to visit, but Thailand, Vietnam, Bali, and Japan look more enticing.
Vietnam is wonderful. You also poop directly onto the train tracks in Vietnam (someone else commented about that), but somehow it’s much cleaner than I imagine India is (though I’ve never been to India).
- Fizz ( @Fizz@lemmy.nz ) 3•3 months ago
South East Asia is an awesome place to travel. Highly recommend Thailand.
Fantastic food. Entirely too rapey.
I’m in a Western country and 9 out of 10 phone calls I recieve are scam calls from India. Right now in my country, there are Indians with temporary working visas protesting because they don’t want to return to India.
India does not seem like a place I want to visit.
In all honesty, I think most people can’t tell an Indian accent from a Filipino accent. I’ve heard primarily Filipino voices on customer service calls for decades now
You can see where the caller is calling from. I’ve gotten calls from Indonesia but never Philippines. Good to know there’s a whole new country of scams I’ve yet to experience
I am myself Indian
I think most Indians don’t realise how large and diverse India is. Most Indians underestimate how foreign parts of thier own country are in terms of economy, culture, language, food etc.
I’ve been working with many Indians remotely who were in India and on site in Sweden and Germany. None of them ever said anything like you describe, most of them were very humble and hard working. Sadly often they would just keep their head down and work into the wrong direction sometimes for a long time not reaching out to others.
But if I’m honest, the people from India were as diverse as any other group of people. From very religious from small villages to atheists from rich families. The division between them was bigger then between them as a individual and me a European. They didn’t even speak the same language and had to use English.
Warning: sweeping generalizations ahead. These are the kinds of opinions I would normally keep to myself.
Based on what I’ve heard from my Indian coworkers, I think India has a culture of ignoring rules that leads to a lot of government corruption. They praise the ability of many people to hire domestic help, but of course they’re the kind of people who can afford it and not the ones providing it.
Based on what I’ve seen in the news, India has a huge problem with Hindu nationalism, which is basically just Indian flavored fascism from what I can tell.
Based on news about the US, I gather the caste system is so pervasive that rules against caste discrimination are being put in place in some parts of the US with large Indian populations. The caste system appears to be a sight variation of overt racism.
Culturally I view India a lot like I view Brazil, The Philippines, Hungary, and Turkey. Economically I view it as similar to China, only a decade or two behind.
I’m not surprised Indians are irrationally proud of their country; Americans are the same.
I grew up in India’s abusive ex (UK). My impression was that people have a
Most people have no problems with Indians and British culture is pretty heavily influenced by India (or at least more so than other countries). Most Brits like Indian food and everyone drinks tea. Vindaloo is especially popular with people who are very drunk, and also happens to be my favourite meal generally (they might ban it in Denmark soon). My experience is that Indians are pretty chill people.
All the news we get from India paints the north as being full of insane zealots/rapists. Stories about whole villages pinning a man down so they can saw off and steal a man’s “holy leg” or young girls getting brutally gang raped etc. I know this probably isn’t the whole story but you need a decent pr team.
Narendra Modi is a twat.
Indians are stereotypically seen as either doctors or corner shop owners. Indians are typically seen as hard working. All tech support and telemarketing is outsourced to India and people don’t typically enjoy those things.
That said the UK does have it’s fair share of racist morons, who will always have a problem with Indians, but that’s because they weren’t raised right.
The caste system and arranged marriage are terrible. It doesn’t strike me as a good place for women.
Narendra Modi is a twat.
Dude should be in jail but he’s the PM ? Nuff said.
Of Modi, who was chief minister of Gujarat in 2002 when more than 1,000 Muslims were slaughtered in an inter-communal riot, she observes: “The courts, the press, the parliament are not functioning as checks and balances. If they were, he would be in jail today.”