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).
I feel combining this with @[email protected] likely creates a fairly accurate sense for the place.
India is, well…despite their historical advances in medicine and continued strong cultural fascination with academia, at some point they became nothing but call centers, distribution points, and scam centers. There is certainly more to India, though when I think of hacking, I think of China and Russia. When I think of scams, unfortunately India is top of the list.
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).
India is big in software. Hardware has to be imported from China / Korea / Taiwan, and we have to pay them what they demand.
So from the perspective of being in the United States. Remote Indian work it’s cheap but of extremely low quality. This ranges from call center workers to programming and engineering work.
This is usually a sign of the company trying to cheap out and having poor products in general. So it’s kind of a compounding problem.
Politically India seemes racist, nationalist, and terrible on climate change. I’m from the USA so yes I know we are not great on these topics as well.
Having been to India a few times from inside here it’s what I’ve noticed in the country.
The poverty and wealth gap between Indians and westerners means almost everybody wants money from you and to up charge you. From beggars, to chai vendors, to high end stores and hotels. They also love hidden fees and you have to be vigilant about details. This puts me on a constant tense alertness when dealing with people that gets very draining.
I’ve also spent time with an indian family during holy. My western friend was dating a member of the family and we went for a visit. The family was very generous and welcoming. It was the only time in India when I was relaxed and able to chat and enjoy the company.
Racism and classism abound. The ways different ethnic groups treat each other and try to force the use of their language on the other group. For example a Hindi and Malayalam language standoff when I was in Kerala.
Or when at a store that sells stone art has two clearly miserable lower cast people working a human powered cutting tool for the tourists when you can hear the sound of high speed electric tools from the back room.
Animals other then cows are treated horribly. Elephants in particular always looked miserable and broken.
People with government jobs are arrogant and lazy. From customs and immigration to the national parks. I arrived 20 min before closing at a national park to buy tickets for a late night tour that was latter that evening. The ticket both was empty with one other person waiting. Two minutes before closing the guy came to the window in a towel because he had been showing before getting off work.
The belief in crap science abounds. I got an ayurvedic massage that wasn’t a very skilled massage and then the guy tried to give me medical advice. Several people tried to explain that the ayurvedic guys were just as good as doctors. On way out another of the ayurvedic “doctors” tried to sell me a medicine that he assured would remove belly fat and regrow hair. This from a fat bald man.
The fiet time I was in India Modi had just won his first term as Prime Minister while I was there. There was a huge procession of angry young men yelling and pushing people out of the way. I assumed they were from the losing party. My driver informed me that no they had just won the election.
It was clear that this wasn’t a jubilant celebration of success. It was a angry group that now had the power to do what they wanted.
I know i’ve been negative and there is a fair amount of nice things in India but they always are fleeting and overshadowed by something. In the multiple times i’ve been to India i’ve never had a bad meal and there are a lot of nice people. I just think they are constantly at odds with each other.
The most Indian moment I had was drinking tea while enjoying the smell of the spice fields. Then the wind shifted and all I could smell was the stench of shit and diesel from the cesspool over the hill.
India is one of the last places I’d like to visit. This is based on how India has been portrayed in various travel shows over the years (Amazing Race, Top Gear). It looks crowded, dirty, and the locals often aren’t very friendly, especially towards women.
One of your main exports to the west is scam calls. It’s a huge PR problem and your government refuses to address it. Your other main export right now is Russian oil.
Indians used to have a fairly large online presence in English-speaking spaces with mixed results. There were a lot of helpful tech bros on YouTube, but also a lot of horny dudes on Facebook. I don’t really see much of either of those anymore though.
My wife works in software testing and has regular interactions with Indians. Some are really nice, but others are really not. Misogyny is far too common and when Indians are rude they are boldly rude.
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.
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I know there is innovation but nothing major springs to mind
There is NO INNOVATION. There are no discoveries happening here. R&D budget and the budget for education is peanuts, there isn’t much innovation happening in India and the innovation that does happen, happens in handful of universities by students who could not afford to move out to a better country which would fund their research.
World leader in shitting on beach, and in disgusting street food vendors
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!
Echoing what other people have said, it’s great that you’re looking for this type of knowledge and taking the replies so well. Awareness of how you (or a group you’re a part of) is perceived is a valuable thing to have, but people don’t often say these types of observations publically.
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.
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.”
Yep and when they pay for better they tend to ship the engineer to their base of operations. Huge brain drain.
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and the fact it invented buddhism.
Siddhartha was born in what is now Nepal.
I went back and forth thinking you meant code like Building Code, or Traffic Code. But you literally mean programming code.
They work hard and get shit done, but it’s always some kind of hacky kluge made from copy-pasted code.
Honestly, I agree.
I will argue that the only code I ever saw from India was from coding firms hired by American companies thinking they can save a few bucks. But then people like me are paid 10x more to fix it.
That code seems to lack any sort of creative thinking or big picture. It’s loops within loops. It’s using stuff like letters for variables, or abbreviations. It’s duplicating code in 3000 line files.
At first, I thought it was just laziness or trying to get it done asap. But then I felt sad when I gave them a lot of feedback, got the changes back, then the next set of code, saw the same issues over again. Like they really don’t see a problem with this.
Unfortunately this is my experience as well. It’s probably something in the way that it’s taught over there? I do love my Indian coworkers-- they’re nice and willing to help or collaborate, and are good people as far as I can tell-- but some of the architectural decisions are something that I can only describe as baffling.
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
Norwegian here. Not that often I think of India tbh, but here is a short bullet point list
- Massive overpopulation
- Rich and dirt poor at the same time
- Castes
- Politically governed by nationalists
- Rape stories
- Massive market thats the only reason we care about India
- Good tech industry (moon landing?)
- Don’t go to Kashmir
- Holi
- Bollywood
- “Indian” food (know that some protein in some sauce with nan and rice is not all an entire subcontinent can offer)
Last show I saw about India was that James May show on Amazon
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
To be fair, every country believes their culture is superior in some way, partly because it’s beneficial for governments to instil a sense of nationalism in its citizens. India’s not alone in that.
I agree, but we have crossed a limit between self-love and self-obsession. It’s hindering progress because people in India are not even ready to acknowledge what’s wrong with our priorities, culture and way of living and are calling anyone who questions their way of life anti-national. Sometimes, it feels like I am living in Eritrea or something!
You see that everywhere. Even within countries that aren’t classed as developing nations. The UK massively shot itself in the foot with the disaster that was Brexit thanks to nationalistic propaganda and outright lies from campaigners, and US liberals have faced “anti-American” backlash for their views.
I can attest to that. I was born and brought up in India, and right now in the US for education. It’s kind of the same here as well, just expressed differently due to cultural differences. The fact that the US is actually the world leader at this time makes these people much more dangerous imo.
In any case, I’m more hopeful about my country after the last election. They seem to be rejecting religious fundamentalism to some degree. It’ll take time, but I think we’re finally starting to see through BJP’s lies. I hope I can go back to India soon enough. (It’s hard to get good jobs in my field there at the moment. Counting on it changing at some point.)
Fantastic food. Entirely too rapey.
I don’t see much about India in the news. I have a friend who worked in a small town for a month during medical school and talks about the poverty and the number of people she saw sleeping on every flat surface in the city.
I work in public education in the US. With Indian families I’ve seen two very different attitudes, which leads me to believe that culturally they either serve others or expect to be served. Most are kind, pleasant, and very appreciative of anything we do for their kids. Others expect us to bend every rule for them- start and end times, attendance, bus times/routes, etc. Our Indian families tend to carry and feed their kiddos longer than others and it seems like little kids (especially boys) ‘rule the roost’ as parents often say things like - he won’t go to bed, won’t stay at the table to eat, won’t get up in the morning, etc. You want to say, “He’s 5. You’re the mom. Set some rules.”
culturally they either serve others or expect to be served
Ohh yes, that’s a nice observation. I have seen people who would just crumble when they encounter someone they perceive to be of a higher class (not caste), but I have also seen people who are “I own this place guys”
It probably talks a lot abt the socio-economic circumstances of their upbringing. Most including me belong to the people who become servile when they encounter authority/class, I am trying to change that tho.
I hate the servility I see around me, people think so less of themselves and way too highly of the corrupt bureaucrat, I have seen what kind of people this culture creates and it’s pretty gloomy!
culturally they either serve others or expect to be served
As an Indian it’s amazing how you perfectly hit the nail on the head considering how limited your exposure has been. Most Indians themselves never realize this tendency of theirs throughout their lives.
no joke dude, I hate this. Indians (including me) become slavish when we encounter authority. I need to change this in myself or leave! This is too fucking gloomy! It’s like our bones melt and we become liquid! ughh…!
