Mumbai – Rudest City???

In the last 24 hours enough ink has been used on this debate about of the rudest city in the world. This of course refers to the recently published The Readers Digest Survey of various cities around the world to find out which one is the rudest and I am surprised to read that our Mumbai has got the title.

Mumbai has been voted as the most rudest city in the world because they, allegedly, don’t open doors for others in public buildings, shopkeepers don’t say ‘thank you’ when a purchase was made and they don’t help people in picking up the papers dropped on a busy street.

I believe there is no shortage of cities in India that will confess them to be far less civilised than Mumbaikars. People of Mumbai are much more polite than of many of it’s counterparts. Mumbai is not the rudest city in India; the world is a far cry.

There is a problem with the structure of the questionnaire. In india if a guy opens a door for an unknown girl, the girl will think he is making advances towards her. Many shopkeepers are not educated enough for such formal pleasantries. How can you expect people to pick up what you dropped when they are all rushing to catch that commuter train in a crowded railway platform? Obviously Mumbai would not have figured well in such a survey.

What exactly is the definition of rudeness? How are the criterions set? Is it fair to make comparisons across cultures?
These are not as simple questions as they appear to be in the first glance. For these allegedly rude people, there are aspects of behavior about which they are very particular. They spit on roads but remove their shoes before entering somebody’s home; they don’t thank everybody but they don’t even address any stranger without the jee suffix. The use of aap instead of tum underlines the Indian respect for age and seniority. Leaving shoes outside the house and places of worship reflects the ritually pure status of home and temple. Let alone Mumbai, we seldom find children addressing their seniors with their names like Mr. or Mrs.-so-and-so. We will always address them as uncle or aunty. This shows how inviting we are to establish relations with strangers.

Clearly, polite behavior is culture specific. Every culture defines its own code of conduct.

Politeness is a shallow promise of good intentions, not too much can be read into it. A willingness to say please is not necessarily a sign of helpfulness or surrender, but merely a way to create an aura of harmony. Politeness creates an illusion of harmony and it is this illusion that cultures combine to create.

The truth is that no society can be rude. Individuals should not be compared with a common yardstick, even societies themselves can’t be. Standards can be applied only if all other things are kept constant. Its like saying: cricket is fairer than football. Both the games are fair in their own respect. One can’t compare two different rulebooks.

It is true that we don’t say ‘sorry’ or ‘thank you’ or ‘please’ too often. But there is a very basic reason behind it. And the reason is that these words don’t belong to our language. Many few people have grown up with this language and fewer people use it in their casual conversations. Now the first question that comes to our mind is that why don’t we use their Hindi alternatives? The answer to that is that we have not grown up saying them either, to the extent that we feel awkward saying ‘kshma kar deejiye’ or ‘dhanyavaad’ or ‘kripya’. Influenced by the west, we are embracing their taboos and are adding them to our own. But the problem is that the new rulebook is not acceptable to a vast majority of Indians, and hence, we see this disconnect between the idea of politeness and rudeness.