What do Israelis think of India?Amir E. Aharoni, living in Israel and loving it despite all the messUpdated Jun 10I can only speak for myself.I visited India four times for work and a tiny bit of travel. Here's what I think of India: - Best food in the world hands down. - Mess. India is messy. The roads seem impossible to navigate. The non-stop honking looks pointless - honking is supposed to draw attention to danger, but if everybody is honking all the time, how can anybody notice it? And so many people walking the streets everywhere. The busiest streets of Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem can't compare to an average street in Mumbai, Pune or Bangalore (the cities I visited). Yet somehow everything works out. - I keep hearing a lot about hostility between Hindus and Muslims in India, but I see Hindu buildings and Muslim buildings everywhere side by side without any apparent problems between them. More broadly, India has many religions and ethnic groups, and even though not everything is smooth, Indians don't kill each other much because of that. I envy this. - It's strange and sad to me that the native languages of India are not used more in communications, education, advertisement, government etc. More English makes it comfortable for tourists, of course, but you should feel more pride about your own languages. You should stop thinking that English is so important. From what I heard, all higher education in India is in English, and it's almost impossible to find a decent job without knowing this foreign language. My Indian friends are very surprised every time I tell them that we speak Hebrew at work, even in software companies, and that almost all of our schools and universities are in Hebrew medium. Although we could do much better ourselves, India could still learn some things from us about respecting the native language. Letting people use their languages more will unleash India's huge human and economic potential. - Bureaucracy. Israeli bureaucracy can easily make a reasonable person desperate, but Indian bureaucracy often goes beyond ridiculous. The consulate promises a business visa for five years and forces me to fill a lot of weird forms and eventually gives me a six-month visa. The consulate clerk asks me whether I have a permission from the government of India to have the business meetings; surprised, I ask whether I need a permission to have a meeting and he says that I don't. And so on. - The head bobble is baffling. I have no idea whether it's a yes or a no. Can be both. - Weird internal racism is taken for granted. I went over personal marriage announcements in newspapers and I was shocked: They were meticulously sorted by language, religion and caste, and if that's not enough, bright skin of both boys and girls was presented as a positive thing. At most, I would imagine that it's fine to mention skin color in a neutral way, as an innate characteristic of a person, but definitely not as a positive or a negative thing. Such a thing wouldn't fly in western countries these days. - The taxi drivers don't know where to go. I would think that the whole point of being a taxi driver is knowing all the streets in the city, but taxi drivers in India don't. - Best food in the world hands down! - An odd and somewhat unpleasant point: A surprising number of Indians see Hitler positively. To almost all people in Europe, Russia and America, and especially in Israel, Hitler is the worst monster ever, World War II is the most destructive event ever, which hurt all the countries that participated in it, including Germany, and "Mein Kampf" is a disgusting and hateful book. In India, apparently, some people think that Hitler was a powerful and good leader, and "Mein Kampf" is a bestseller, and they ignore his responsibility for the death of many millions of people. It may be due to lack of education, or maybe for some other reason. - India is so cheap. A taxi for an hour in Mumbai costs like a taxi for five minutes in Jerusalem. A whole lunch in Pune costs less than a sandwich in a coffee shop in Tel-Aviv. - Cricket, cricket, cricket everywhere. A lot of people in Israel love football and basketball, but my impression is that it's nowhere near the passion that India has for cricket. Everybody loves it. Young, old, men, women, Muslims, Hindus, everybody. - I frequently think that even though Israel is a heavily militarized country, India is even more so. But maybe that's because when I'm in India, I spend most of my time in Pune, with all its military camps. - I have this strange feeling that people in India don't really understand each other even when they speak in their own language, be it Kannada, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil or anything else. - Though some of these things may read as kind of negative and strange, it doesn't change the most important part: Indians are friendly, well-meaning and clever people. - Oh, and: - Best food in the world hands down!!!
