Vikram’s Viewpoint: “I shower every week”

By Opinion Editor Vikram Mahajan

It was a dark and stormy night. I grinned slyly at my iPhone. Another night, yet another mindless scroll of Instagram reels. The typical combination of brainrot, politics, and movie clips flashed across my screen. Then, as I swiped down, I saw something else altogether: a tourist ordering street food in India and hurling a barrage of disgusted insults throughout.

As I saw the reel, and read the comments, I grew increasingly disgusted — not at the food, but at the tourist. He mocked the street vendor, calling the food he chose to try “slime,” ruefully predicting that he was “going to get ill,” and ultimately announcing that he wouldn’t be eating the food he’d ordered anyway — it all evoked anger within me. Not because it was something I hadn’t seen before, but precisely because it was something that I had repeatedly encountered on social media. The comments, calling the food “diarrhea” and conveying baseless narratives of Indians as unclean, only redoubled the racism and made it more explicit.

The tourist hadn’t even made an honest attempt to engage with another culture, or another cuisine — the ostensible purpose of food reviewing. Rather, the reel was bad-faith engagement, deliberate clickbait derived from affirming stereotypes about Indians’ unhygienic food and personal habits. It was the kind of clickbait that blurred the line between stereotypes and reality to augment anti-Indian racism.

This content circulates often on social media and ranges from bad-faith food critics such as this one to CGI depicting Indians as shower-abstinent call scammers. Cloaked within this seemingly-jocular content, are the genuine racist beliefs and sentiments that these reels help reinforce.

I’ve seen many of these reels already, but this one hit different. Perhaps because while others at least expressed some legitimate reservations or concerns about their food, this creator had walked to the vendor with an attitude of disgust already predetermined. Perhaps because he mocked the vendor, an aged man attempting to make an honest living, directly to his face in a language he couldn’t understand, but with enough derision to make his meaning nonetheless clear.

Or perhaps because my lived experiences tell me how simply untrue the narrative promulgated by these content creators really is. I’ve lived in India for eight years and tried street food countless times; while it’s certainly necessary to be a bit wary of certain sellers, areas, and foods, particularly if you’re a tourist, the industry as a whole serves savory, reasonably-priced snack items, not the disgusting slop it’s so often portrayed as on social media. And when that misconception becomes a bad-faith narrative that’s relentlessly pushed by content creators looking for easy views and engagement, it denigrates not just an entire industry but an entire culture.

This extends well beyond just the anti-Indian racism that proliferates on social media, and although the lesson is widely known, the most unexpected wake-up calls can help in its reinforcement: for it was only in the dim darkness as I saw this reel that my phone screen illuminated me to this reality.