Anyone who has ever been to India can attest to the fact that the country is extraordinarily loud, noisy, crowded, and – there is no way around it – stinky. The air on the subcontinent is different from that everywhere else in the world, because it comes in flavours – curry and extra crispy. It is also disgustingly dirty and unhygienic.
Visitors from the First World to this Third World hellhole often find themselves asking – while praying for a swift and merciful death on the Throne, as a direct result of catching the trots, which EVERYONE does when visiting India – why things are so bad there. It is not, after all, as if there have not been many attempts to civilise the place.
The British tried, for over 200 years, to turn India into something other than a backwater with a gigantic population of illiterates, ruled over by a Brahmin caste that jealously guarded its privileges and social status. They sort of succeeded, but only up to a point. As soon as they were gone, India rapidly devolved into rigidity and stagnation.
Even when India finally opened up in the 1990s, and its economic growth rate exploded upward, and living standards across the country rapidly began to rise, the extreme problems of pollution, noise, and general filth, got WORSE, not better.
So what is it, exactly, about Indians, that makes them so awfully bad at maintaining their own surroundings?
It is a complex question with a difficult set of answers. But part of it, inevitably, has to do with the sheer lack of civic sense that Indians have. And this is largely unique to the people of the subcontinent:
That lack of civic sense, in turn, fundamentally comes from Hinduism.
This is an offensive opinion. I make no apologies whatsoever for it. When you have an entire religion that teaches your life is the product of your past actions, and you deserve your current status, and there is really nothing you can do about it except to suffer and endure in the hopes that your good deeds will result in a better status in the next life…
Then you end up with an entire social structure designed to reward complacency and punish responsibility.
This helps explain why, back when the leaders of the independence movement in India came to Britain to negotiate the liberation of their country from the British Empire, their British hosts were reportedly shocked to find the Indian delegates – all of them high-class, highly educated, very knowledgeable, urbane, sophisticated men – attempting to defecate in the streets, and refusing any responsibility for cleaning up after themselves.
This lack of civic sense really makes itself felt even among India’s wealthy classes – having money does not make them more civic-minded, only more entitled. And you really see that when things start to go a bit wrong, as is inevitable in India when the weather – which is horridly hot and extremely humid for about 10 months of the year, no matter where you are – gets nastier than usual:
This helps explain why Westerners who go to India are often shocked and horrified by the sheer state of decay of the place, and the intrusiveness of the locals:
And that is how bad things are for men, never mind for women. Indeed, my advice for single White women going to India is:
DON’T.
Just DON’T.
Go somewhere else. Anywhere else (except Africa or the Middle East).
Go wash elephants in Thailand, or teach English to orphans in Cambodia. But DON’T go to India.
4 Comments
My sister spent 4 years in New Delhi from 2018 to 2022 and just got back from a 6-month stint in Mumbai. She didn’t have any trouble there, but she’s also pushing 50 and morbidly obese. She also worked for the US Embassy school and lived just off the embassy compound in provided apartments and just never really left the embassy grounds or her apartment. She had a maid who bought and brought in groceries for her and just never really had a desire to leave the “safe spaces” otherwise.
She never said much about it other than “it’s too polluted to ever open the windows” (except during the COVID shutdowns). She didn’t want to go back for the Mumbai stint, but the place was in a bind and she still had a valid passprt and work visa and felt like she didn’t want to let her former co-workers down, so got peer pressured into it, you could say. I haven’t had a chance to talk to her about Mumbai yet, so I don’t know what she thought about that city vs New Delhi.
That said, I know she doesn’t plan to ever go back either.
Didact, you don’t see the opportunity I see… If it a white woman with a nose/septum/whatever piercing and/or an unnatural blue/purple/pink/whatever hair dye (or a Karen) then we should dump them all in India as a fitting punishment for both them and the unfortunate locals!
Pajeets will pajeet, forever. Have zero desire to travel to India. The pajeets I have had to work with are “okay”, but they are tribal (go figure, right). Mrs. S had a pajeet princess for a college housemate for a semester (the pajeet princess dropped out aka couldn’t hack it). She has a very different perspective on pajeets from that experience (I can’t say those things, this is a proper forum….???).
“all of them high-class, highly educated, very knowledgeable, urbane, sophisticated men – attempting to defecate in the streets, and refusing any responsibility for cleaning up after themselves.”
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to me, this looks like a LOT MORE than simple “lack of civic sense”. hell, hygiene / personal body odor would mandate that any person would use a bathroom facility when available ( and they’re almost always available in a 1st world urban setting ) rather than just dropping trou in the street and carrying the dingleberries around for the rest of the day, rubbing the poo pearls into your underwear. and onto whatever seating you might use.
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not to mention, if it’s common practice for you and everyone else to engage in street shitting, that means that you’re constantly tracking through it all the time. hope you guys have adopted the Japanese practice of taking your shoes off when entering the home otherwise you’ll be tracking feces throughout the house.
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even the Arabs have enough sense to only make the left hand unclean.
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it does make me ask what went wrong in India though. ancient Sanskrit and Greek share words, and even if that weren’t true Alexander got clear over into northern India. how is it that the Western Indo-European caucasians have been well familiar with basic hygiene for millenia but the Hindustani caucasians persist in smearing shit all over everything?