To everything of marvelous I've been saying about India, my experiences and travels, some reality is naturally missing.
And probably because now I'm in countdown to return, the contradictions start jumping even more to my eyes and things that I took as inevitable start adding up and bugging me.
And of course I have to mention them to you at some point. So now is the time.
Here is the possible summary, of only the things that occurred to me now.
Of course you find exceptions, but for sure the rule in this country is as I witnessed:
They have no ‘collective thinking’.
They naturally try to take advantage of every situation.
They are very rude. To an outrageous point.
There´s no such thing as client service and satisfaction except in 5 stars.
To be a foreigner means to be seen as 'a walking dollar bill' (quoting Mariana).
The misery is really miserable here and many social roles and rules just reinforce it and make it inescapable for many right from birth.
To be a tourist here is challenging, to be an expatriate is a daily fight that in the end wears your energy and patience down.
I’ve never seen more lack of efficiency, logistics management, organization, information. E.g., it took me 5 hours in the main post office of Bangalore to finalize the process of giving in my parcels to send to Portugal. I had to accompany all the phases of the process to make sure the boxes didn’t get wrongly tagged, weighed (which at first they still were), placed, etc.
Their mind-set is very rigid and oriented towards survival, advantage and rituals. I’ve hardly seen or met anyone who seemed to be happy.
CHILDREN are spoiled if they are boys, put up with or mistreated if they are girls (mostly because parents will have to pay loads to the groom's family for them to get married). They're put to work or crippled to beg for money.
Animals, namely street-dogs, are often mistreated.
The corruption is very high and works at all levels of society.
You see irresponsible action all the time:
- for public safety (maniac driving; street lighting/energy having exposed cables and high tension circuits at hand level; unstable sidewalks and construction structures; the Police maintaining metallic structures in the middle of the road with no notice or illumination, etc etc etc),
- for public health (burning garbage in the street; throwing any sort of garbage anywhere, even rivers, even office floors!; even supermarket items are full of dust)...
The level of Civilization of Indian society is very low.
This is a country of contrasts where you keep bumping into opposites.
Socially they are stuck to ancient cast system, prejudice and pre-conceptions that limit the life potential of the Self.
There’s little space for love in this culture. It’s more about rituals, obligations, convenience, logics and one's or one's family's goals.
They forbade dancing in Bangalore and any place closes strictly until 11.30 pm. Justice definitely doesn't target the actual problems.
They lack assertiveness. Even their head movement for 'yes' looks like 'more or less' or 'maybe' or even 'no'. And they don't know how to say 'no' or 'i don't know'.
Their notion of hygiene is VERY poor, so you definitely have to learn how to share your space with cockroaches, lizards, spiders and many sorts of biting mosquitos.
Shops, pharmacies, all sorts of businesses look exactly the same from the outside and you can rarely find what you want at first.
Women hold a very poor condition irrespective of their social status. The poorest and oldest work in construction (!). The younger and richest can only wait for the day they'll be given to a man chosen by someone else. The average cannot expect to be spoken to by a man. In many cases women are the ones working while the man stays sitting and drinking at home, and plus they suffer abuse.
People have hardly any social life, they live their family's or their husband's family's life, very often not their own.
Dignity doesn't exist here as I have known it until today. Not only do many people not act respectfully and don't act as to be respected, as also the cast and social differences really make people treat others as if they were not the same race or kind (either too tyrannically or too submissively). Plus there's the whole condition in which people appear to you to beg etc ETC ET CETERA.
People simply accept and repeat what their ancestors have done, evolution is very relative in this country and mostly stimulated by foreign investment.
ULTIMATELY AND SURPRISINGLY THIS COUNTRY WORKS IN CHAOS.
