Courtesy calls....

According to this ,already very much in the news ,Readers Digest Ranking New York City is the most polite city in the world, while Mumbai carries the distinction of being the least polite.

I want to move to NYC, LOL….. Mumbai ( I’ll take it as representative of India) fared the worst, well I won’t contest that, I mean after all that smiling at strangers and wishing them good morning , and thanking bus drivers, etc ,etc in NZ and to some extent in Alabama , if I did the same thing in India I’d get weird stares…may be ,just may be the folks who conducted the survey are prejudiced but it’s a dog eat dog world back home ,and people don’t try to hide it .

A simple hello in the West is just that, a greeting, sometimes you feel “Oh wow! That person keeps greeting me and saying hi, they must really like me”.. But the fact of the matter is, that it’s just force of habit, don’t expect the person who greeted you so nicely a to listen to the problems in your life.

Getting back to India , its tough , some times you get chided by peers just for saying please and thank you, and in the process lose any good manners you were brought up with , people think twice before giving up a hard earned bus seat to some one who probably needs it more, not everyone treats domestic help with respect , I don’t see many young nineteen year olds treating fifty five or sixty year old strangers with any particular respect , I like to think that under that core of brashness exists a national heart of gold , I bet it still exists , but it's getting harder and harder to find these days!!!