A Metro guide to the best of bad manners

Do you hiss inwardly when your host prefers the TV to you? Does your blood boil when someone starts to knock on the ATM door seconds after you are in? Are you ready to burst into tears of gratitude when someone says “thank you”?

You are a victim of common rudeness. Are people ruder than they were?

Rudeness is escalating, says Lynne Truss, the author of Eats, Shoots and Leaves who went on to write Talk to the Hand, The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World, or Six Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door. She thinks rudeness is a sign of the collapse of society. (Her second book comes from the phrase ‘Talk to the hand ‘cause the face ain’t listening.’) Since collapse of society is an immense, ongoing event, connecting nations, and is perhaps the greatest manifestation of globalisation, not to mention privatisation and FDI, Truss, though she talks about the UK, seems to speak for a lot of places when she says: “It’s about us all not knowing any more how to share space with each other, or treat each other respectfully.”

Some point to the other contemporary evils: TV, technology, social networking, Internet, cellphones.

“The 20 and 30-year-olds are ruder these days,” says psychiatrist Sanjay Sen. “A lot of misplaced aggression remains bottled up inside them. Lack of attention at home and not being brought up well often reflect in their attitude towards others.”

Often economic security gives one a false sense of confidence and makes a young person rude and arrogant, Sen adds. Then, a young person starts to believe that he has to be arrogant to display his competitiveness and stand out. But this only reflects his insecurity.

Some, however, feel things are as bad as they were before.

“It is wrong to brand any particular generation as rude. I am against this nostalgic generalisation that it is a rude modern world,” says Bula Bhadra, professor, department of sociology, Calcutta University. Class, money and power often lead to rudeness and violent behaviour, she says.

“I don’t think young people nowadays are rude,” says Sajni Mukherji, who writes a column on senior citizens for Metro. “Perhaps a little cheeky, sometimes, but I don’t object to that. I grew up in an environment where the most respected elderly people used the ‘bc’ word of unspeakable incest with zest and a frequency that made it like a punctuating comma. One almost respected the elan with which they did so. Many of us use the brother-in-law word in the same meaningless way,” she adds.

Rudeness is eternal, universal, if not congenital.

Were good manners always symptoms of an inborn urge toward community? Bad manners of ego and isolation? But what about the pleasure that one gets out of being excruciatingly, heart-rendingly rude? Did you hear Mark Twain on Jane Austen? Read on to find out. Meanwhile, here’s a list of 10 types of contemporary rude behaviour, in ascending order of offence.

10 Rude email

Email such as “Get this done” or “Shoot this mail”. Or just “shoot”, “play” or “print”. It is the word that is omitted, which could very well have been “please”. Or when after writing an expansive, effusive mail, such as “O Boss, on Boss’s Day, please accept this small token of our appreciation. It is true you give us late nights, long meetings, and endless issues. But we love you because you give us strength and leadership and we party most nights anyway. Thank you from us all! A smiley to you…” you get a reply that just says: “tks”. Expanded, it means: “You don’t matter.” Smaller issues are not addressing the recipient, not signing off, not providing a subject and using the Caps Lock mode: it’s only the equivalent of screaming.

(Besides you are not supposed to cough, sneeze, belch or blow your nose loudly in front of a colleague.)

9 No reply to email

Is worse than “tks” or “rgds”. Related thought: Does human decency break down when people don’t see each other? Is that why wars start? As the world moves towards being — or is already — one virtual nation, are we in danger of becoming a planetful of rude, angry, lonely people without social skills?

8 No reply to text

Worse than no reply to email. Because it would take even less than a minute or a word, perhaps just a “k”, to answer a text. (And don’t treat your workstation as your personal kitchen. Leave it clean.)

7 No reply to phone calls

Hanging up mid-sentence (the interlocutor’s). Or keeping a person on hold while you discuss your future vacation with your girlfriend on the other phone. The last is not a conversation; it is showing off.

6 Hoarding food on your plate

Gather ye primroses while ye may, but not sheekh kebab on your plate. You look like a rude, greedy monster as a background to your plate; and remember, the sheekh kebab is better off outside you than inside.

5 Door unmanned

When is the last time someone opened the door for you? You cannot remember, but you did, many times, and people from behind streamed past you and marched off towards the lift without batting an eyelid, let alone muttering a “thank you”, and you are left holding the door. You get what you deserve. It is your bad karma. But haven’t people been to school?

4 Lift rush

When will office-goers stop treating the lift as an extension of public transport? As soon as the lift is sighted, a wild roar goes up, and much jostling follows, as does the survival of the fittest, and so many in this city are unfit. Should there be a ticketing system?

3 Forwarding chain-mail

It is extremely rude to send mail that ends: “Add this to ur favorites after reading!! Or you will have a bad year of Relationships.” This is emotional atyachar and blackmail.

2 Cellphone always

Do we really need to connect with everyone else on this planet all the time? Someone walks into a party, gets a drink, and immediately flicks open her cellphone. She is calling another soul in need of desperate cellphone conversation. Cellphone addicts should be banned from parties and condemned to listen to only cellphone music and read only text messages. But perhaps that would delight some.

1 Seeing through people

The unkindest cut. You meet a neighbour in the street or a colleague walking down the office corridor, and you are ready to smile, but all you get is a blank stare. How do you feel?

Like a fallen soufflé. Or an insect crushed by a sledgehammer. The blank stare can really knock you down. When just a smile, which requires even less effort than a text message, would have been quite enough and a greeting added to it would have sent you dancing.

So enjoy the excruciatingly rude Mark Twain on Jane Austen: “I haven’t any right to criticise books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticise Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice, I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.” Austen was not spared even in her death.

And are we rude writing about the rude? No, we are just holier than thou.

What is the rudest behaviour you have faced in the city? Tell ttmetro@abpmail.com