The Last Luxury: When kindness feels like a radical act

On a family vacation in Thailand recently, while helping myself to the breakfast spread, I struck up a conversation with the hotel’s chef-at-large—a sociable Mexican gentleman with stories from half the world. I told him about my first trip to Mexico last year, and how endlessly fascinating I’d found his country.

He, in turn, spoke of a life spent on the move—working with top hotel chains in Mexico, North America, Puerto Rico, Jordan, the Maldives, Qatar, Bali, Jakarta—and for the past few years, in Bangkok. Curious, I asked him which country he’d liked living in the most.

“Here,” he said without hesitation. Even though Southeast Asia was far from home, he found it the easiest place to live. The heat didn’t bother him, nor did the language barriers or the distance from family—because, as he put it, people here are kind, gentle, and respectful.

Life in other countries was harsher. In Jordan, he said, softness was often mistaken for weakness: “If you aren’t aggressive, they think you can’t get the job done.” America, he added with a shrug, was “just America”. Which of course, doesn’t need translating. In other words, the US was transactional, brisk, each person fending for themselves and preferring as little human contact as possible. But in Southeast Asia, the everyday grace of mutual respect had won his heart.

I usually avoid traveling to hot countries, and Thailand—for obvious reasons—isn’t a destination I visit often. My last trip there was nearly eighteen years ago. I was younger then, and the world felt more peaceful. Climate anxiety hadn’t consumed us yet, nor had mass-scale consumerism. Back then, the constant folding of hands and bending over with a sawadika—it felt overdone. I found Thai people sweet, but polite to a fault.

The world is very different now. Conflicts rage across continents—especially close to home in the Middle East, in Iran, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine. The mass bombings, countless deaths—we now live with a pervasive sense of doom.

In such a time, to be surrounded by people who smile easily, who apologise if they so much as brush your arm, who bow and thank you for visiting their shop counter even when you buy nothing—it moves me deeply. The gentleness that once struck me as excessive now feels like grace and humanity.

It’s telling that basic human courtesies now register as something unusual. But such are the times.

I was struck by the warmth of the people of Nainital while in the hill town last week for the Nainital Literature Festival. From the volunteers who helped run the event to the attendees: hotel owners, retired bureaucrats, teachers from the old British-era boarding schools, there was a human touch in every interaction. People gave you their full attention. The hotel staff served not just with professional polish but with an unmistakable sincerity, without the silent expectation of a heavy tip.

There was the polite local taxi driver who took me sightseeing, unfazed when I lingered longer than planned at a stop where parking was scarce and the chorus of honking cars deafening. Or the young driver who later ferried me through a storm‑hit highway from Nainital to Bareilly airport. Fallen trees had blocked the road, and the local authorities, true to form, were in no hurry to clear the way—good old‑fashioned bureaucratic languor. The driver, barely twenty‑six, was anxious all the same to get me to the airport on time.

“I feel terrible when a passenger misses a flight,” he told me while unloading my luggage, “even when it’s not my fault. But now I am happy you will make your flight. Now I can exhale.”

The contrast, once you landed in Mumbai, was almost immediate. The indifference outside the home was too stark to ignore—it feels sharp against the warmth of the hills. Why was it that survival in our large metros demanded a kind of emotional armour? Politeness was treated as naivety, patience as weakness. We went through our lives, glancing past one another, lost in private deadlines and small frustrations and angers.

As a young person, Mumbai’s energy felt electric to me, now it felt abrasive—a city that allegedly made space for everyone felt like a place where people mistook detachment for sophistication.

We were all only too aware of each other’s lives on social media, and yet many pretended to not have seen a thing. Why was aloofness prized over intimacy? And why was it that before you could even respond to how are you and how are the kids, the person asking the question had taken back their attention and directed it at someone else in the room. There was a reason small talk was big in the city.

In Thailand, the masseuse kept thanking me as she served me tea, washed my feet in warm water, and insisted on putting my carpet slippers on for me. Her gratitude felt unnecessary, almost jarring. I felt bad for her, and wanted to shake her out of that instinctive deference. That level of humility can feel almost disturbing to someone used to brusquer exchanges. Yet everywhere I went—in restaurants, shops, airports—people smiled with what seemed like genuine warmth. Whether it was performance, habit, or something deeper, I couldn’t quite tell.

Later, I read that Thai culture is renowned for its friendliness and politeness, rooted in Buddhist values and a strong sense of social harmony. Concepts like jai yen (cool heart), sanuk (finding joy in everything), and mai pen rai (never mind, let it go) encourage calm, composure, and an easy acceptance of life. Perhaps that explains the quiet contentment I sensed everywhere—and the effortlessness with which courtesy seemed to shape its people’s daily life.

It made me wonder—doesn’t India have its own values rooted in warmth and consideration? We touch feet, we say namaste, we pride ourselves on being hospitable. Yet somewhere between survival and success, we’ve stopped letting those instincts guide how we treat one another because we’re too busy pursuing success or paying EMIs. What would it take, really, to make every brief human exchange—at a shop counter, in a lift where we avoid meeting another’s eye, or while boarding a flight—leave the person next to feeling a little better about life?

We could receive our Swiggy parcel with a smile. Or go a step further, it’s getting hot out there—we could offer a glass of water to the delivery boy, help an older woman lift her suitcase off the baggage belt. A few months ago, I had to ask a group of young men to give up their seat for my mother near a boarding gate. Small courtesies that should come instinctively now seem to need prompting. I’ve noticed this basic humanity elsewhere in the East—in Singapore especially—here consideration still seems part of daily rhythm.

It’s not an impossible ideal. We just seem to have forgotten it was once ours.