Tag Archives: Indians

Rant

The Fix for Indian behaviour : Lashing

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I was discussing with PC the Path finder how most Indians have a poor sense of social responsibility and civic sense. Filth is everywhere, no one follows rules. Most people think only of their own convenience, not their fellow countrymen. How even countries like Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Cambodia are better than India in this regard. During the discussion, we bumped into the solution that can fix all this. Lashing. If there’s one thing that can fix the behaviour of Indians, it is lashing.

Humiliating, public flagellation. Import some strongmen from other countries for this purpose. Train them in the art of lashing. For minor offences, mete out punishment immediately. Ask the offender’s family to witness, too.

Some examples below:

Civil Offences

OffenceLashes
Intentional Littering20 lashes, pick up litter with mouth
Public urination20 lashes, rub face in own piss
Spitting in public20 lashes, someone else spits in offender’s eye
Invading personal space5 lashes, smear shit under the nose
Public Smoking50 lashes, send to live in Delhi for 2 months during winter
Listening to music/watching videos on speaker in a public place20 lashes and destruction of phone
Farting in an enclosed public space20 lashes and tape smelling salts under the nose
Presssing the wrong direction button in a lift10 lashes and banned from lift for 1 week
After the lift arrives, asking people inside if the lift is going up or down10 lashes and banned from lift for 1 week
Civil offence lashings

Financial

OffenceLashes
Faking rent receipts100 lashes plus fine double of amount
Fake fuel bills (Car lease policy users)200 lashes plus jail
Fake driver’s salary (Car lease policy users)200 lashes plus jail
Financial Offence lashings

Traffic

OffenceLashes
Overtaking incorrectly20 lashes, car impound for 1 week
Jumping red light50 lashes, car impound for 2 weeks
Overspeeding20 lashes, car impound for 1 week
Driving with modified silencers50 lashes, put said silencer against offender’s ear and start engine
Drinking & driving100 lashes, pour alcohol over offender and set on fire
Traffic offence lashings

These are just examples. I am open to feedback.

Rant

Pathetic Indian Expats

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As per Wikipedia, Indians make up the biggest group of expats in the world. Also, Indians seem to be leaving their country in droves. This post is not about Indian expats in general, but about a specific group. This group lies somewhere between migrant labourers and well earning/spending Indian expats and makes up a sizeable chunk of expat Indians.

Indian Expat Roommates, PC: YouTube

This group of Indian expats doesn’t leave their home country to provide a better life to themselves and their families. These Indians want one thing only – To save as much money as possible. Unfortunately, over the years, I have met many such pathetic lowlives.

These Indian Expats

  1. Emigrate to other countries without their families. The idea is they earn in a higher-valued currency and send money back home where the family spends it in a lower-valued Rupee. Is more common among Indian women, as they see it as a way to escape their in-laws.
  2. Work for desi companies like TCS, Wipro, Infosys who pay below market standards as per the host country, but more than they pay in India. However, I have also seen such people in more reputable companies earning a decent wage.
  3. Shack-up with roommates in tiny hovels. Some are middle aged, pushing 40, but still share a bed with other lowlives like themselves in tiny apartments. Also, they all start hating each other after some time, but still stick around in the same house. Because cheaping out on money is more important.
    I have shared homes with other guys when I was in/fresh out of college, but never shared the same bed and only once shared the same room. At this age, I would rather sleep in the streets than share a room with other guys.
  4. Are all extremely miserly. Don’t spend money at all, cook all their meals at home themselves.
  5. Frequent (cheap) whorehouses to fulfil their carnal desires.
  6. Spend long hours at work, because there’s more space compared to their rooms.
  7. Assume that just because you’re Indian too, you will drop everything to help them with their work.
  8. Order around and behave rudely with staff at Indian restaurants.
  9. Are universally disliked by the local population and normal expats.
  10. Return to India after saving enough money to buy 2-3 houses and be branded “foreign return”.

Basically executives/managers living lives of labourers. Personally, I keep my distance from such people as much as possible as they depress me.

Hate, Rant

I have had it with Seat Swappers

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As the title says, I have had it with seat swappers. After years of tolerating (and sometimes accommodating) them, I have no patience with such people anymore.

I wouldn’t be wrong to say that most Indians are seat swappers and almost all seat swappers are Indians. Seat swapping is an integral part of an Indian’s psyche.

One of them could be a seat swapper
PC: Jetcost

Their mission goes something like this:

  1. Buy bus/train/plane tickets for yourself and your family members/friends, knowing full well you are not sitting together. Don’t rectify the situation by selecting your seat online.
  2. Show up on the date of the journey and board said vehicle, nonchalantly.
  3. Once on-board, look for an unsuspecting victim whose seat you like.
  4. Walk up to them and politely ask/demand that they swap their seats with you.
  5. If refused, give them a nasty look and find another victim.
  6. Repeat steps 3 to 5 till all members of your party are sitting together.

Ever since I was young, I have seen them in action. Whenever you board an Indian transport, you can see people frantically discussing this with each other. I can understand 30-20 years ago, maybe when booking train tickets, you were not allowed to choose seats. In some such cases, seat swapping was necessary. But at least for the last 15 years, Indian train ticketing allows you to ensure all members of your party are sitting together. For airplanes, you could always ask the check-in personnel to give you seats together. For last 15 years, you can select seats right at the time of booking. Same for busses, now. Most providers allow this for free or for a very small charge.

Whey then, do seat swappers exist? They exist because these bastards are too lazy to do even the bare minimum mentioned above and select seats. Sitting with the rest of their group is important for them, but not important enough to select seats in advance. Also, these people have no respect for people who did bother to follow the process.

When I travelled regularly for my job, I came across such bastards on almost every single flight out of/to India. In the beginning, mostly, I accommodated them. After that, I started accommodating them, only when the new seat was the same type as my original seat. Sometimes, I went through multiple rounds of seat swapping before being able to settle down.

Eventually, I grew so tired of all this that I started to pretend to sleep after boarding. Still, some shameless people would try to shake me “awake” to swap seats.

I remember one specific incident when I was travelling to Melbourne. I had paid ₹1200 out of my own pocket to reserve a window seat on the Air India flight. As expected, after I settled in, a woman came and started crying that she and her son got different seats and asked me to swap seats. I politely told her I had paid for my seat and I was not moving. She muttered something like “people have no compassion” and started walking away. Already on edge, I immediately lost it and insulted her in front of dozens of people. I told her that if sitting with her son was important for her, she would have paid some money and made sure they had seats together. I was fuming for hours afterwards at the nerve of the woman.

Interestingly, I have seen this behaviour only among Indians. Others either selects seats in advance or don’t care where they sit. In fact on one long-haul flight from Sao Paulo to Dubai, I saw a white woman sitting separately from her 2 daughters (both <10 years) and all of them were perfectly fine and behaved the entire time.

End of Rant.

Rant

Indian Insecurity

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Indian insecurity is legendary. We Indians are probably the most insecure group of people in the world. Be it our religion, our culture or our nationality, we are woefully insecure about everything. It doesn’t take much for an Indian to get butthurt. In fact it is quite possible that the derogatory term “snowflake” was coined for us.

A few examples of Indian Insecurity

  1. Wearing a Saree decorated with flags of different countries (including our own) offends Indians.
  2. Having a doormat with the Indian flag offends Indians. The same company selling doormats with flags of 50 other countries doesn’t offend any of those 50 countries.
  3. A woman smoking offends Indian men.
  4. Banning fireworks on Diwali in the most polluted place in the world offends Hindus.
  5. Not being familiar with Sachin Tendulkar offends Indians.
  6. Making a movie by the name of Billu Barber offends barbers. Making a movie by the name of Dhobi Ghat offends Dhobis. A song with the word Mochi offends cobblers. A movie about law offends lawyers.
  7. Condom ads offend Indians.
  8. Criticising stupid & intrusive religious practices offends Indian Muslims.
  9. Characters using abusive language in movies offends Indians. Using the same language in real life is acceptable.
  10. People belonging to minority religions using Hindu gods in advertisements offends Hindus.
  11. Britishers sharing photos of Hindu gods on Social Media offends Hindus.
  12. A Hindu actress shooting an intimate movie scene with a Muslim actor faces calls for boycott.
  13. Not respecting poorly presented meals offends Indians.
  14. What some people name their kids offends Indians.
  15. Any map showing the reality in Kashmir offends Indians.
  16. Criticising the government or your politicians offends every Indian who voted for them and results in sedition cases.
  17. Some of the few people who visit this blog will be offended by this post.
Indian insecurity about a Saree
Offensive Saree, PC: Maharashtra Times

These are just some examples of Indian insecurity that I remembered from the top of my head; there are countless such cases.

Overall it is embarrassing how easy it is to offend Indians and how insecure we are to get offended by little things. I am not sure where this insecurity comes from; this Quora answer looks legitimate to me.

This insecurity is something we Indians must overcome to focus on more important things.

Rant, Travel

FASTag is a failure

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A few years ago, the government introduced an ambitious project called FASTag-Electronic toll collection. On paper, this was a great initiative & long overdue – a simple RFID sticker affixed to your car windshield that sensors at toll collection centers on highways will automatically scan. The appropriate toll would then be deducted from your linked prepaid wallet. To make things even better, this prepaid wallet wouldn’t be maintained by FASTag, but by a few partner companies (Like ICICI Bank, PayTM, Airtel, HDFC Bank among many others). You can order your FASTag from any of the partners, stick it on your windshield by yourself and maintain appropriate balance in your wallet before passing a toll plaza.

Not Easy at all. PC: FASTag.org

This would ease congestion at toll collection centers because people wouldn’t need to fish for change, wait for balance, interact with a human etc. They only need to slow down at the toll center and the boom barrier opens automatically to let you through. Why would anyone not want to use this method as opposed to fishing for cash? A perfect arrangement, right?

Wrong. Indians being Indians made sure not to let a positive thing succeed.

I have been using FASTag for many months, but it was on a recent trip to Agra that I realised that this initiative has been a complete failure.

  1. Most highways still don’t accept FASTag. 7 out of 8 toll plazas on my trip to Agra didn’t accept FASTag. These were all on Western Peripheral Expressway & Yamuna Expressway.
  2. People have sworn not to use it. Typical Indian mentality is doing the opposite of what you are told to do, and in this case, the people did exactly that. People have sworn not to use FASTag and they have kept their promise.
  3. The government has been too lenient in enforcing its use.

The one toll plaza on my trip which did accept FASTag was backed up for at least 1km, and that too in the FASTag exclusive lane. It was evident that people were not using FASTag. I decided to note what the 10 cars ahead of me did while passings the toll (There’re electronic displays showing toll status).

  • Only 1/10 cars ahead of mine used FASTag.
  • 7/10 cars ahead of mine had FASTags, but insufficient balance. They all paid cash. I believe this is because by law all new cars are mandated to be delivered with a FASTag and these cars had one but the drivers never bothered to add balance to their accounts.
  • 2/10 cars ahead of mine didn’t have any FASTag.

The fact that even when cars come preinstalled with FASTag people don’t bother to use it shows me what a failure this has been. On top of it, the government seems to have backtracked on its claims that people who enter FASTag lanes without one will be penalised or charged double. The toll collector sitting in the FASTag lane booth didn’t even expect anyone to use a FASTag, he was quite casually taking cash from people and returning them change.

Why anyone would chose to use cash when there’s a much simpler and convenient alternative boggles my mind. It is a testament to how stubborn we Indians are and refuse to do something new even at the cost of convenience.