TYPICAL INDIAN MENTALITY

  

 

<<Customer Service in India is excellent if you have power, money or grease (as in grease the palms). It is substandard if you do not have the aforementioned. Many of us or our parents, or kin have many sins from the way we may have treated our African Brethren in East Africa. How many times was the ‘houseboy’ accused of stealing sugar and his pay docked….when in fact the kids had used it for something else. How many times the breaking of mere glass accidentally was treated like a crime against humanity. As a Great Soul once said, “let him who have no sins, cast the first stone.”>> 

John, well said. You’ve prompted me to pour out my feelings on this matter. In the annals of our East African heritage an African is a ‘boy’, a person of low integrity and somebody who could be disregarded. We might have blamed the Colonialists for such an absurdity but it is we Indians who have been the real culprits. Even today we are apathetic about its social reform and this wicked attitude sadly still exists among us. 

Not only are we discriminatory but there is also meanness about us that is awful. We look down on our houseboy, suspect him, humiliate him and subject him to harsh treatment. As you’ve rightly put it, he is accused of everything that is missing in the house and his meager salary chopped. In case he accidentally breaks a glass or plate, the choicest abuse is hurled at him. Man’s inhumanity to man. Very sad! 

It is generally felt that we Indians are discriminatory, greedy, selfish and sycophantic. This is deduced not out of nothing but through a process that experiences umpteen such recurrences. Of my Indian brethren, many a time I’ve witnessed disgusting attitude. Let me exemplify it here. 

In the fifties and sixties when Colonial East Africa flourished, we East Africans were looked upon with respect in India. I recall at the Dewji Jamaal Musafirkhana on Omarkhadi in Bombay we were received with open arms by the care takers and those around there. Come the post seventies phase and we were literally discarded and held in contempt while the ‘Khoja Muscatis’ (the settlers in Muscat, Oman) reigned over the place. Despite securing free accommodation (they being entitled to five star hotels by the Oman Government) at the Tajmahal and Sheraton, they rented a room in the Musafirkhana and deprived us of a room there while the caretakers cared a damn about us East Africans. They looked greedily upon the Muscatis just as they used to do our ‘chamchagiri’ in the past. 

We’re no saints but merely pretend to be good.