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What does the world think of India?
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2024
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Asklemmy
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It was the loudest and smelliest country I’ve ever been to.
I’ve never seen a country where the cross-country sleeper train bathrooms had literal holes on the floor to shit and piss out of. You saw the tracks wizz below you from the toilets. No plumbing, just excrete onto the tracks.
Chennai train station had the strongest most overwhelming diarrhea smell I ever experienced in my entire life.
Dudes were creepy as hell. They see you’re white and then you’re swarmed everywhere you go. People trying to scam, trying to appoint themselves as your tour guide and won’t stop following you and trying to guide you to “the mall”. Calling you Harry Potter because you wear glasses. I couldn’t imagine what would happen if I was a woman there. I shudder to think.
Crossing the street means walking into oncoming traffic and hoping and trusting everyone to just drive around you. Absolute fucking chaos. The people are not warm or friendly. They stare and get too close and touch you all the time. I kept having people touch my shoulders and try and touch my face when I was in public or queuing.
I never ever want to return to India ever again. I don’t recommend any of my friends go there. There were very few positives about that trip other than it being an eye opening experience as to how over 1 billion humans on the planet live.
This is more of a culture thing, I used to do it a lot when I was younger (it's considered friendly)
Thank you for being genuinely interested in the opinion of others and for explaining culture differences.
To someone from my culture and to me when I was there, I hated it. It felt the absolute opposite of friendly. It felt predatory. I didn’t feel safe, I felt uncomfortable, I felt I was a freak and an oddity and it made me embarrassed to go anywhere. And this was with Indian-American guides who were familiar with which places to go to and which to avoid for tourists.
I say this to you with no disrespect to you as a person. I’m just trying to state things without sugarcoating them. I appreciate you explaining the cultural perception.
I feel no connection to this culture whatsoever, I would happily follow your cultural norms if ever am lucky enough to visit the West, so you are not offending me, and I appreciate the honestly too :)
Train toilets dumping directly on the tracks isn't excessively unusual, we still have trains here in Austria that do that although it is definitely being phased out.