2025 Was the Year of the Belligerent Indian Abroad

Annoying, dirty, insensitive, crass, entitled and narcissistic. These are only few of the adjectives that have been directed against Indians in 2025. It’s hardly surprising considering we exported all our favourite national activities across the world: singing, dancing, and littering in public places, illegal fireworks, misogyny, monetary scams, and constructing oversized statues of gods.The world’s Indian experience of 2025 can best be summarised by the words of one misogynistic desi man who, while filming his studly self at the Vatican City, was trash-talking a woman visible in the background of his video. “Aaja baith jaa” (come sit near me), he gesticulates into the camera in a suggestive tone that all Indian women are familiar with. We live in a country full of such men.Like it or not, the world was forced to baith ja as they got front row seats to our desperate attempts to position ourselves as culturally and spiritually superior. Viral videos of our ‘Indianness’ ranged from a group of Gujarati tourists dressed in yellow t-shirts doing a listless garba on the 124th floor of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai to a house burning down in Edmonton, UK, due to illegal fireworks. Eating on public transport? Check. Surreptitiously photographing women? Check. Harassing female tourists on a Thai beach? Check. Bargaining like it's your birthright? Check. Yelling at hospitality staff? Check.Another group of garba grabbers forced Austrian street artists to hand over their speaker and broke into the folk dance on the streets of Innsbruck. “Have you ever thought of playing garba in Europe? Well, I had and now I can tick it off the bucket list,” one of them posted on Instagram. I dread to think what other Indian bucket list items will be completed across the world in 2026.You might argue that Chinese tourists often top the list of badly-behaved travellers, but the Chinese travel abroad more than four times the amount Indians do. As far as global bad behaviour is concerned, we certainly punch above our weight.“Recently, illegal fireworks were set off at Church Street Park, damaging the cricket field and leaving behind a significant amount of litter. The incident jeopardises community safety and negatively impacts local sports programs and park visitors,” the Morrisville Police Department in North Carolina, US, posted the day after Diwali. Irritation with Indians peaks around the time of this festival every year.It’s ironic that those who belong to a country that routinely suppresses peaceful public dissent, arrests its citizens for social media comments, and even bans them from walking on grass in many public parks, run riot across the world, doing exactly as they please, disregarding the rules of the nation in which they may be travelling or living. We can count on the band of Proud Indians to increase our nuisance footprint across the world every year.Behind the Scenes of Repatriation: What Happens When an Indian Dies AbroadThe year began auspiciously with two big US companies—Apple and Fannie Mae—sacking many Indian American employees for creating false donation records. They were essentially re-routing company money to themselves via charitable organisations. It was what you might call classic Indian jugaad. The year-end was nicely book-ended with prominent Indian American wellness guru Deepak Chopra being named in the Epstein files.Emails showed that Chopra cheered Jeffrey Epstein on when he was told that one of his victims had dropped a case against the pedophile and sex trafficker that accused him of abusing her when she was 13 years old.Even as hate speech and xenophobia cast a fast lengthening shadow across the world, and Donald Trump, that darling of many upper caste Hindus in the diaspora, issued diktat after diktat against our country (tighter H1B visa rules, high tariffs, and deportations), we managed to carve out a special niche for ourselves. India Fatigue became a term increasingly discussed around the world. Researcher Prabhakar Krishnamurthy distinguishes it from the you-don’t-belong-here sentiment that characterises xenophobia and describes it as a “complex challenge in international relations”. “It’s about a gradual weariness or irritation that develops in response to a particular country’s overexposure in politics, economics, culture, and media—in this case, India,” Krishnamurthy says. “It often emerges even in societies that don’t have deep‑seated racial hostility toward Indians, but feel saturated or strained by certain patterns: constant civilisational self‑branding, high‑profile scandals, aggressive lobbying, or perceived double standards.”Our civilisational self-branding is best illustrated by the rapid pace at which we are constructing Hindu religious monuments across the world. This year we erected a 51-ft Ram statue and 54-ft Shiva statue in Canada. Both are said to be among the tallest statues of these gods outside India.The Shiva statue in Brampton is being positioned as a quick weekend puja getaway—step aside Flower Town of Canada, as Brampton has traditionally been known. Hanuman bhakts can head straight to Texas, where a 90-ft bronze statue was inaugurated last year. And yes, the largest Hindu temple outside India was built in New Jersey in 2023. Work Hard, Live Poor: The Broken Economics of India’s Hustle CultureAs we continue on our uncaring, unabashed global journey of doing as we please, we will increasingly run into the wrath of the far right in the western world. The successful Indians in Donald Trump’s government, for example, are widely hated among his group of MAGA followers, as is Usha Vance, the wife of Vice President JD Vance. Recently a far-right group in New Zealand blocked a Sikh religious procession by performing a Haka, ironically a marker of the tribal identity of the Maori people who have faced systemic racism from the ancestors of the very folks performing the traditional ceremonial dance against a group of immigrants.“The real discomfort starts when the economic hierarchy doesn’t line up with expectations,” entrepreneur James Blunt tweeted recently. “When the immigrant isn’t struggling. When they’re winning…big homes, expensive cars, kids doing well, businesses thriving.” Either way, Indians would do well to respect the rules of the places they visit and carry their successes more gracefully as they explore the world.(The author is the founder of India Love Project and on the editorial board of Article 14. This is an opinion piece. All views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)

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