Everything after immigration is reputation

I love the fact that I am Indian. Not as a disclaimer, but because it is genuinely true. Then again, I suppose that is how most people should feel about their own country. Even so, I remain fascinated by India. By the fact that it still exists in its entirety: a civilisation that has absorbed every invader, outlasted every empire, contains extraordinary variety in language, culture, and cuisine, and, amid a world of growing conformity, continues to produce some of the most curious, warm, and intellectually alive people on earth.

I love its improbable complexity and, in its deepest crevices, its simplicity. When you meet the best of us in the cities, or the most grounded among us in the mountains, it stays with you. Which is precisely why what follows is worth saying.

The Indian traveller of 2026 has a reputation problem. Not in the abstract, not in the careful language of diplomacy, but in the specific, operational way that determines how people are received the moment they board a flight, walk into a hotel, share a public space in another country, or reveal where they are from. It is discussed in hushed tones in some quarters, openly in less tolerant environments, and rather loudly and consistently across social media. Airline crew, hotel concierges, B&B hosts, restaurant owners, store managers, cab drivers, and travel forums across the world are slowly sharpening their opinions through lived experience. The candour, when you find it, is uncomfortable for anyone who holds an Indian passport and takes pride in it.

How we got here

There is a predictable moment in the rise of every large middle class. The world stops seeing individuals and starts seeing a category. Chinese tourists experienced that transition in the early 2000s. Their arrival was sudden, their numbers vast, and they became a global stereotype almost overnight. As social media, overtourism, and globalisation accelerated, the complaints became familiar: volume, spatial entitlement, an obsession with documenting rather than experiencing, rushing through attractions, and a general indifference to local rhythm. The prevailing mood was simple: we want your money, but we do not necessarily enjoy your presence.

Indians are now entering the same phase. Only faster.

In the past few decades, we have gone from being largely invisible abroad to being impossible to ignore. The numbers are growing, the spending power is growing, and so is the scrutiny. Most Indian travellers are perfectly decent. That is not the point. Reputations are rarely built on averages. They are built on memorable encounters. The burden of being Indian in 2026 is that wherever we go, we arrive carrying the collective reputation of all who travelled before us.

Across parts of the travel industry — from international airports and hotel lobbies to breakfast buffets and cruise decks — Indian tourists are no longer invisible. Expectations around them are increasingly shaped by accumulated experience. A kind of institutional memory that develops when the same patterns repeat often enough to influence perception. A mental model that no tourism campaign can easily reverse.

The comparison that stings most, precisely because it is so instructive, is Japan. Japanese tourists travel the world and leave remarkably little friction in their wake. Quietly and consistently, across decades and destinations. Just people who carry their civic instincts with them across every border, as naturally as they carry their luggage.

The result is a national travel reputation that has become a form of soft power. Nobody had to announce it. It accumulated gently, gradually, one interaction at a time, over many years.

That is what a collective standard looks like in practice. And it is a useful mirror.

Who is travelling, and what they carry

Before judging behaviour, it is worth understanding where it comes from.

India is one of the most densely populated and socially competitive societies on earth. We spend our lives negotiating crowds, queues, traffic, noise, interruptions, and scarcity. More than a survival skill, the everyday hustle is an art form.

In such an environment, assertiveness is often rewarded. A significant portion of India's new travelling class comes from worlds where volume is a professional instrument. Talking loudly on the phone, swearing in public, watching videos at full volume — these are often norms rather than exceptions. Whether they inherited success in a Tier-2 town or earned it through the grind of building a life in a big city, most Indians have been shaped by environments where restraint is considered meek. Inconsiderate behaviour frequently goes unchecked, the loudest voice gets priority, and might is often considered right.

This is less a character judgement than a functional adaptation. In such a setting, privacy is not the default, but a privilege. Behaviour that appear inconsiderate in Zurich, Vienna, or Copenhagen are often unremarkable at home. The problem is not that Indians are uniquely inconsiderate. It is that habits developed for one environment are being carried into another without adjustment.

When that operating system travels to a ryokan in Kyoto or a vineyard in Tuscany, the collision is almost inevitable.

It would be convenient if the problem stopped there. But it does not.

The behaviour that attracts attention abroad is not confined to any particular income bracket, profession, or region. It can be a group of shop owners from Gaffar Market in Delhi's Karol Bagh heading to Canton Fair on business. A diamond merchant from Surat taking an extended family holiday in Switzerland. A corporate off-site in Macau. A group of school friends, now in their fifties, heading to Phuket with their families.

Something changes when we travel in groups. People who are measured and professional in their daily lives often conduct themselves in ways that would make that demeanour entirely unrecognisable. 

Demanding alcohol before a flight has taken off. Passing comments at cabin crew. Sprawling across a quiet lobby in a Bali resort. Blasting bhangra through a cheap bluetooth speaker on a cruise deck while everyone else is trying to enjoy a quiet sunset. Hosting a family reunion at full volume in a New York restaurant that took months to book. Treating a UNESCO heritage site as a personal photography studio, oblivious to the queue forming behind.

The details vary. The pattern does not. 

The common denominator is not class. Neither is it education nor bank balance.

It is the group.

The Indian individual abroad is often thoughtful, observant, and socially aware. Put that same person in a group of compatriots and something shifts. The private self recedes. A louder, less context-sensitive collective self takes over. The group becomes its own permission structure. If everyone around you is doing it, it cannot be wrong. If nobody is visibly objecting, it must be acceptable.

That assumption is where many of the problems begin.

The misplaced confidence that wasn’t earned

Layered over these older habits is something newer: a confidence that has arrived faster than the civic norms needed to support it.

Part of that confidence is economic. Millions of Indians who would never have imagined an international holiday twenty years ago can now afford one. Part of it is technological. The smartphone has compressed the world into a screen and made familiarity feel effortless. And part of it is political. A steady diet of national achievement, repeated often enough, can create the impression that arrival has already occurred.

Confidence is not the problem. Every rising society deserves some measure of it. The problem begins when confidence outruns self-awareness.

A politician posts a reel about cleanliness and it is received, widely and sincerely, as evidence that India is now clean. A new expressway inauguration makes headlines and is now proof that we are a nation of considerate drivers and road discipline. Grand infrastructure, broadcast and amplified at scale, is absorbed not as aspiration but as arrival. WhatsApp groups light up. National pride slowly drifts into assumption.

The country is powerful. Therefore I am powerful. The country has arrived. Therefore my conduct requires no particular adjustment. I deserve validation and respect from the world. 

This is where misplaced confidence finds its fuel. Not in genuine global experience or sustained engagement with the wider world, but in a sense of arrival that has outpaced reflection. What it produces are poor ambassadors.

What it actually costs

The consequences extend beyond awkward hotel lobbies and bruised national pride.

Social media has accelerated everything. A single incident, filmed and shared, now travels further than a thousand unremarkable and pleasant interactions. The video of boorish behaviour at a monument. The audio from an argument on a flight. The photograph of a public space left in a condition that would embarrass anyone. These circulate. They accumulate into a shorthand through which a nationality comes to be understood by people who have not yet formed their own impression.

By the time the considerate Indian traveller arrives, the room has already been arranged.

The Indian who pays the real price for all of this is not the one generating the noise. It is the one who has spent years building a reputation abroad. The student navigating a new country with more grace than most locals manage. The family that queues, keeps its voice at a human register, and leaves every place as it found it. These people carry the accumulated impression left by others as an invisible surcharge on every interaction.

What Travel Is Actually For

Travel, done well, is one of the more civilising experiences available to us. It asks us to step outside our assumptions and observe how other people have solved the problem of living together in public. It reminds us that our way is one way, not the only way. It makes us more interesting, more tolerant, and considerably better company.

India has every ingredient for a travel reputation worth having. The curiosity is genuine. The warmth is real. At our best, we are excellent company anywhere in the world.

The gap is not between good people and bad intentions. It is between private decency and public awareness. Between how we treat people we know and how we behave in spaces shared with strangers.

That gap can be closed. Not through a campaign. Not through a slogan. And certainly not through wounded defensiveness whenever the subject is raised. It closes the same way reputations are built: one interaction at a time.

Holding a door open. Lowering a voice. Respecting a queue. Thanking a server. Taking up a little less space. Arriving with curiosity instead of entitlement.

Nations do not acquire reputations through speeches. They acquire them through millions of ordinary interactions conducted by ordinary people.

The passport can only get us through immigration. Everything else after that is reputation.