Indians on Phoren Land

Frankly speaking, I was planning to write this piece back in January, i.e. the time when I had just returned from my Thailand trip. But it’s never too late and I am back with this piece again.

I am not a frequent traveler but I have heard lot of stories about how Indians are treated in foreign countries or how Indians behave in foreign countries; and my recent Thailand trip proved each and everything right.

I will give you few examples. We had gone to some park in Bangkok, there were good amount of Indians out there. I felt very happy to see our people there but soon this happiness turned into a major disappointment.

I was standing in a queue for the lunch, few other Indians were standing in the queue too. But the queue was moving way too slower than it should. The reason? Few guys, instead of filling in their own dishes and moving ahead, they started doing the same for each and every family member. (Who were not in the queue obviously). So it was like 1 person taking food for 3-4 people at a time. This was obviously not the scenario with all the Indians but yea I saw quite a few guys getting into this kind of mess.

The fun part is yet to come. Every table had 4-5 chairs and glass of water for each person. Couple of guys on the next table, got up to get some food.. 2-3 guys passing by from that place, saw the glass full of water, drank the water, kept the glass and moved ahead. I was like “WTF these guys are upto?” Everyone, including me, kept staring at those idiots. Some idiots even managed to throw banana peel on someone else’s empty table.

And this was not enough, while going out, waiting for our bus, few Indians in a group, opened up a huge pack of “chivda” (Indian snack) and started eating it as if they have never seen it in their whole life. So, after finishing their so called “snack time”, they left keeping the place dirty.

There were many other instances were I felt ashamed of being an Indian, even at the airport, they started making their own queues with 4-5 people standing together and some guys joining their friends in the queue, I even heard some saying “Apna he hai.. aaj jaa na”. The staff at the airport was going crazy managing these guys, there was not exception in the plane too. I saw crew members getting very irritated with these guys.

I had bee to couple of malls in Bangkok. The noticed sharp change in behavior of staff towards the Indians. No, they were not rude at all but they knew, Indians mostly come to the mall for the window shopping, try out few things and go away.

This is not just limited to one place. I have heard so many cases from UK, US and Canada too. Some funny incidents like..

In US, if you don’t put stamp on the letter, the postal department send the letter back to you. So our fellows, to save the cost, they post the letter without any stamp on it and in the “from address”, instead of writing their own, they write the recipient’s address and “to address” is their own address. So, when the postal department does not find any stamp on it, they return it to the person in “from address”. So in this case, the recipient is the “from address”. And this is how the post gets delivered to the right person without spending a penny.

There are numerous examples like this but the moral of the story is, we end up messing up the places. I don’t know why we do it, obviously all Indians are not like that, may be small minority but because of them the majority suffers.

I have absolutely no idea if this is going to be improved or not. Let’s hope for the best.

Note: By this post, I never meant to say that we Indians are bad at things, we are absolutely not but some of us certainly are.

Image: Caution Tape by Eugene Zemlyanskiy