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Desi Alert

 


Desi Alert

At the end of all her travelling, Shobhaa De comes home to Mumbai and writes the most revealing lines in either of her columns, and she has no idea she has done it. She is relieved. The airport is gorgeous, the immigration officers are polite and efficient, and best of all there are porters and loaders to carry bags that somehow weigh a ton. She has missed this abroad. She calls it a basic requirement rather than an indulgence, and says the absence of such service might make her rethink certain destinations. She means it as the tender gratitude of a tired senior citizen who has earned her comforts. It is the most honest sentence she writes in two columns of scolding. And the man who makes it true, the porter bent under her ton of luggage, is the one person she never once thinks to see.

That is the whole problem, standing right next to her in a uniform.



De has spent two columns cataloguing the sins of the loud desi. The pushing past the queue. The pack travelling together and bullying strangers to swap seats so they can sit beside a cousin brother. The drinks, the peelay peelay, the pinched bread rolls and the theplas smuggled in enormous bags, the haggling, the VVIP card thrown on the table to demand the seating that the reservation system has denied. She is a sharp observer and most of it is true. Then she reaches for an explanation, and the explanation is where the column quietly collapses. She decides it is a primal memory, a deep-seated insecurity bred by generations of shoving into overcrowded trains and buses and bullock carts, a national fear of being left behind. We were starved, so we stuff ourselves. We were crowded, so we shove. The whole nation shares the wound.



It is a beautiful piece of misdirection, and I doubt she knows she is doing it. Because the people who actually rode the unreserved general compartment, who actually lived the scarcity she invokes, who were actually left behind, are almost never the people on the international flight. The man bullying the Singaporean cabin crew did not grow up fighting for standing room on a passenger train. He grew up with a servant to carry his bag and a driver to bring the car around. The scarcity is borrowed. It is an alibi lifted from the lives of the poor and worn by the comfortable to explain away their own bad manners as a kind of collective trauma. The trauma belongs to the Dalit and the Adivasi and the migrant labourer who genuinely got nothing and feared the train would leave. The behaviour belongs to the savarna middle class that liberalization sent abroad. De fuses the two into a single "we Indians," and that fusion is the engine of the whole essay, because it lets a class portrait pose as a national one.

Watch how she secures her own position while she does it. The loud desi is beneath her. So, in the very same column, are the Americans, the Trump-like bullies, the spring-break blonde startled by a stray dog on the street, the people too sheltered to recognize an animal she has coexisted with all her life. She places herself precisely between them, above the vulgar Indian and above the ignorant Westerner, the one cosmopolitan in the room with the taste to notice all of it. This is the oldest move in the class playbook. You manufacture your own refinement by naming everyone else's vulgarity. The disdain is the distinction. De is not standing outside the structure she describes. She is standing on its upper floor, and the view from up there is what lets her mistake her own caste-and-class location for a vantage point above caste and class entirely.


Which brings us back to the porter. Her quarrel with the loud desi was never about how the laboring body gets treated. It is about volume, about polish, about decorum. She is entirely at ease inside an order of service and deference, the porters, the loaders, the customs men in their dazzling white, the immigration officers doing their duty, so long as she is the one being served and the service is performed quietly. The loud tourist she despises and the gracious socialite she is share the exact same relationship to the man carrying the bag. He exists to carry. They disagree only about how much noise to make while he does it. The casteism is not in the boorishness. The casteism is in the porter being invisible to both of them, and De has just written a love letter to his invisibility and called it coming home.

None of this would travel the way it does without the machinery that moves it. The "desi alert" she imagines hotels issuing is not a joke, it is a description of real infrastructure. Forty years of reform built an enormous apparatus to move the Indian middle class around the planet and to manage it once it lands. Budget carriers and aggressive package tours, the hotel chains and their internal codes, the visa regimes that loosen and tighten, the duty-free corridors, the EMI that finances the holiday, the WhatsApp group that plans the trip, the reel that documents it. These are the mobile networks of neoliberalism, and they do two things at once. They produce the savarna tourist by giving him the means and the permission to go. And they amplify his worst instincts by turning the trip itself into status, a thing to be performed and brought home and shown. The garba circle on the tarmac at Hanoi is not only bad manners. It is content. It is paisa-vasool optimized for an audience back home, the holiday converted into proof that we have arrived. The networks reward the swagger. The swagger feeds the networks. And the man at the centre of it has been told, his whole upwardly mobile life, that occupying space loudly is what success looks like.

Here is the part that keeps me up. The "desi alert" does not check your caste at the door. The category is blunt and it catches everyone. When the savarna man abuses the flight attendant, the flag goes up on all of us, the Tamil grandmother, the Dalit student who travelled harder than anyone to be there, the Bengali academic ordering water two rows back. We are all read through his performance and profiled through his entitlement, and the one who provoked the alert pays the smallest price for it. De's response to this, the only response her vantage point allows, is to ask the brown body to behave better. Be quieter. Tip more. Earn the respectability she has already awarded herself. She offers embarrassment where there could be solidarity, and she mistakes that embarrassment for critique.

She will not write the column about the porter. He carries her luggage and her blind spot through the dazzling white halls of the airport she loves, and she breathes in the fishy air and calls it home.

The columns discussed here

Shobhaa De, "Indian tourists can antagonise even the most gentle people in the world," ThePrint, 2 June 2026. https://theprint.in/opinion/mumbai-memo/indian-tourists-can-antagonise-even-the-most-gentle-people-in-the-world/2947657/

Shobhaa De, "The annoying flock of desi tourists," Mumbai Mirror. https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/opinion/columnists/shobhaa-de/the-annoying-flock-of-desi-tourists-/articleshow/68009420.html

Editorial support for this essay was provided by Claude Opus 4.8.

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