How nasty quarrels could seed good public behaviour
1 min read . Updated: 25 Dec 2022, 11:54 PM IST
PremiumVideo clips of these may alter the attitudes of Indians who are conditioned to treat other Indians badly
A few days ago on an Indigo flight, there was an altercation between a flight attendant and a passenger. A video clip shows the flight attendant confronting a passenger who she says had been very rude. She says that his poor behaviour had one of her colleagues in tears. He asks her to “shut up" and she asks him to “shut up". She also tells him that she is not his servant; that she is “an employee". This is very good. There should be more confrontations of this nature and they should be filmed and shared widely.
Indians are among the worst people to fly. Nicer Indians have been hoping to reform them, but reformation is generally useless. Good public behaviour is not about character; it is about pretending to be good because the other option will have bad consequences. But, daily, in airports, cafes and malls and offices, India trains Indians to believe that bad behaviour is safe, even advantageous. Also, a sign of authority.
A cultural circumstance of Indians is that they show respect by appearing servile and that elicits an animal instinct from whom they serve. How much bad behaviour we tolerate at the very first instance is how we train people to treat us. And Indians in the service industry have been training not only Indians, but the whole world to treat them poorly. The long rope they give and their hamming of servility when they only mean to convey respect, makes even people from the West forget their manners a week after they land in India.
This was why the flight crew of Air India behaved in infamous ways, especially on the Gulf and East Asian sectors that often served passengers who were not very sophisticated. Once on an Air India flight, when the carrier was still owned by the government, a man complained about the food and the flight attendant told him, “Sir, next time you fly Jet." True, such swag also emerges from the fearsome job security that a government employee has, but I am confident that she was also consciously training the guy and his like-minded peers to behave themselves.
If Indians know that they cannot get away with bad behaviour, they always consider the option of good behaviour, something that most Indians experiment with when the crew is not Indian but Caucasian. White people seem to terrify them. Video clips of Indian flight attendants showing a low threshold for poor behaviour would thus further persuade Indians to be nice to fellow Indians as well.
Even so, I do not want flight attendants to have such a resounding victory that they transform into the self-important and fierce cabin crew on American airlines. But then, no human system achieves social equilibrium; life swings between unfairness and excessive worker assertion; between how Indians behave with flight attendants and how American flight attendants may treat an Indian who has asked for a third glass of water. Maybe the closest we can come to social justice is when people who feel strong and assured of their social status concede some poor behaviours by people who serve them.
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A few years ago in London, I was in a bus that had several Indian cricket legends, including Vinod Kambli and Kapil Dev. Kambli was standing in the aisle and narrating an anecdote to someone, his hands flailing. The bus driver snapped at Kambli, telling him that he was distracting him and that he should sit down. The bus was not moving; it was stationary in a parking lot. The driver probably did not know Kambli, but he knew he was an Indian cricketer, and that so was the person listening to Kambli’s story, and that the bus had several Indian cricketers. It would be lazy to call the driver a ‘racist’; it is almost always lazy to call anyone that. He was just a man who felt something and had complete social freedom to voice it. I think he would have said that to an English cricketer, too, someone who may have been trained by many rude drivers never to stand in the aisle of a bus and talk aloud. Kambli was embarrassed and hurt. He had no choice but to quietly sit down. It was a moment of social justice perhaps. The funny thing about social justice is that it is not what people imagine; often, it is not pretty.
Sometimes, there are practical reasons why Indians behave poorly. For instance, bad behaviour works. I was on an Air India plane that was on the tarmac for four hours at the peak of summer with its air-conditioning off. It was a bunch of unruly passengers who forced the airline to open the cabin doors. (These days when an airline announces abruptly that unruly passengers would be prosecuted, I know that the flight is going to be delayed or cancelled.)
In my previous column, I argued that India keeps Indians “in a state of childhood", and as a result, Indian adults behave like children. This is also why Indians have so many demands the moment they realize that someone is paid to serve them. Poor behaviour is not just rude behaviour, but also having unfair expectations, like the number of times you want a waiter or flight attendant to come and take orders. Also, in all the offices I have worked, it was common for sahibs to ask a peon to bring them a glass of water. I’ve never worked anywhere where I didn’t hear “paani pilao", which is still a deep auditory memory of an Indian office. People who fetch their own water are very different from people who want it brought to them.
Office peons themselves are not averse to being ordered around for tasks that should not require another human. In fact, they get a bit concerned if you tell them that the sahibs should be independent enough to fetch a glass of water themselves, because the job security of the poor comes from the childish condition of their masters.
Manu Joseph is a journalist, novelist, and the creator of the Netflix series, ‘Decoupled’
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