The modern Indian culture is abhorrent: Bollywood, Punjabi Songs, loud celebrations, and so on. The modern Indian society is status-driven. Growing up, I used to hear that we are getting ‘Westernised’: becoming more individualistic, unapologetic, and expressive. Sadly, we’ve taken it all too far. That’s what happens when you mimic: you forget what made you special and in trying to become something else you become confused about your own identity.
Indians are one of the worst behaved people on the planet. For some societies, the lack of awareness of civic sense comes out of poverty and illiteracy. But for the modern Indian, it comes out from a weird place of arrogance.
It’s probably because rapid growth after prolonged scarcity has released pressure valves and the suppressed generational trauma is getting released in the form of littering places, driving rashly, bursting crackers loudly, corruption, misbehaving in foreign places; as if to loudly announce “I just don’t care anymore”, possibly overcompensating for the past centuries of suppression.
Whenever an Indian honks loudly in my street to decimate the quiet of my evening, or overtakes me on the road, or bursts loud firecrackers outside my window while I’m trying to read, or argues where the next temple should be built, or plays music in the mountains, and whenever I see empty bottles of Kingfisher near a lake, whenever I see an Indian being loud at a restaurant, I just wonder, what the fuck has happened to us, and look away.
