I speak Truth, maybe Harsh truth but I speak Truth

I genuinely feel that India has become a low-trust and deeply judgmental society. I don’t know if this happens only to me or if others feel it too, but I’ve noticed it everywhere — in Varanasi, in Gurgaon, and in other cities I’ve lived in.

Whenever I go to a convenience store — the kind where you pick up the items yourself and go to the counter for billing — I can feel the staff constantly watching me, as if I might steal something. It’s uncomfortable and disheartening. I’ve experienced it multiple times, even years ago when I was with my family in a South Indian town. It makes me wonder whether trust has simply disappeared from our day-to-day interactions.

And it’s not just in shops. I feel that in India, people are judged for everything — their religion, caste, income, family background, net worth, education, or even the clothes they wear. Everyone is busy measuring others. There’s always comparison, competition, and silent judgment.

But what bothers me more is the deep-seated mindset I’ve noticed — an inherited sense of inferiority. Many Indians tend to automatically place people from Western or foreign backgrounds, especially Europeans or fair-skinned foreigners, on a higher pedestal. It’s almost as if colonial history has left behind a subconscious belief that people from those cultures are somehow “superior.” You can see it in how attitudes change — how some people become extra respectful and polite when dealing with foreigners, while being dismissive or harsh toward their own countrymen.

This isn’t about race — it’s about psychology. It’s a kind of cultural conditioning that makes people admire anything that comes from outside while undervaluing what belongs to them. It’s like a collective inferiority complex, passed down through generations of colonization and repeated invasions.

Even at workplaces, this mindset quietly shows up. When I speak in meetings, I’m often interrupted or not taken seriously. Yet the same people show exaggerated respect to outsiders or those who look or sound different. It’s as if we’ve been trained to treat each other with skepticism but to treat others with submission.

Maybe this comes from our long history of being ruled by others — we’ve internalized those hierarchies instead of outgrowing them. But the sad part is that it has made us mistrustful of one another, constantly competing and judging rather than cooperating.

I really wish we could rise above this. I wish we could learn to respect ourselves, value our own people, and see each other as equals. True progress, I think, will begin when we stop seeing ourselves as less than anyone else.