Rude Nation: Indians got rich faster than they got civilised

 LET ME TELL YOU something that nobody in our drawing rooms wants to say out loud—we Indians have become, quite spectacularly, a rude people. Not the grinding poverty kind of rude that desperation sometimes forces upon a man. No. I’m talking about the nouveau riche, freshly minted, business-class-seat-reclined-before-takeoff kind of rude. The kind that wears a Rolex and still cuts queues. The kind that moves into a gated community worth `5 crore and proceeds to park in someone else’s spot every single morning.

We have money now. We have malls. We have lounges, premium memberships and EV charging bays. What we spectacularly do not have, it appears, is civic sense.

Let’s start at 35,000 feet, because that is where Indian entitlement reaches its cruising altitude. Walk into any domestic flight in this country, and you’re not boarding an aircraft—you’re entering a referendum on who matters more. The moment the boarding announcement is made, there is a stampede that would shame the Pamplona bull run. Families who have assigned seats behave as though the Titanic were sinking. Overhead bins are conquered like territorial disputes.

Now, let us descend into the mall, that great temple of aspirational India. The Indian mall is a sociological experiment gone sideways. We built these gleaming shrines of consumption, we gave them food courts and multiplexes and brand stores, and then we filled them with people who treat the premises like an extension of their living room. Families park prams in the middle of walkways and stare at you blankly when you try to pass. Young men loiter in packs, blocking escalators, apparently unaware that the left side is for standing and the right side is for walking—a concept that has apparently not yet arrived in certain postcodes of India.

Rubbish? That’s what the floor is for. Staff? That’s whom you snap your fingers at. Personal space? A Western concept, surely. The tragedy is that these aren’t poor people who’ve never seen a mall. These are people who go to malls every weekend. The familiarity has not bred comfort—it has bred contempt.

But nothing prepares you for the anarchy of the Indian residential complex. We have built some of the most beautiful gated communities in Asia. Landscaped gardens, swimming pools, and clubhouses with squash courts. And within weeks of moving in, residents are filing noise complaints, battling over parking bays, screaming at security guards, and conducting WhatsApp group wars that would exhaust a UN peacekeeping mission.

The RWA—that peculiar Indian institution—has become the last frontier of unhinged power. Men and women who are perfectly pleasant at the office transform into petty despots the moment they are handed a committee seat. Rules are enforced selectively, grudges are nurtured lovingly, and domestic help is routinely humiliated in lifts designated “for residents only”. We built a community, gave it gates and guards, and then decided the only real enemy was our neighbour.

So, what went wrong? Here’s my honest answer: we got rich faster than we got civilised. Economic mobility is a marvellous thing, but it doesn’t automatically confer dignity—either given or received. We never built a culture of public courtesy because we never had to. For generations, public spaces were chaotic, so chaos felt normal. Now we have order around us, but disorder still lives within us.

Civility is not weakness. Holding a door open does not diminish you. Saying please and thank you to someone in a uniform is not a sign of social decline—it is a sign of class.

We want to be a global superpower. That ambition is legitimate, even laudable. But superpowers don’t just launch satellites and build expressways. They teach their citizens that a country’s character lives in its smallest, most unremarkable moments— in a quiet queue, in a held door, in a simple, unhurried “excuse me”.

We are capable of extraordinary things. It is time we decided that basic decency is one of them.