Rudest Cities

One of our local dailies highlighted the announcement that Kuala Lumpur (Capital of Malaysia) is now the 3rd rudest city in the world! This status was derived from a survey carried out by Readers Digest magazine. It's reporters were sent to the 35 cities in which it publishes it's magazine to carry out the survey. The result was reported by The Times of London.

According to the survey, New York topped the list as being the most polite followed by Zurich. The most impolite turned out to be Mumbai, Bucharest and Kuala Lumpur in that order.

The criteria was what is considered courtesy in the West - holding doors, helping strangers and service with a smile.

I think the survey is not very thorough and most probably the subjects selected were not enough to be used as a yardstick against the rest of the population of the particular city. How many reporters could they send to each city? How many people could they have tested? What were the status of the subjects? What about the population of the cities concerned? Was all these taken into account?

The population of Mumbai is approximately 12.7 million. 1% of this is 127,000. This figure is about 35% of the population of Zurich which came out 2nd most polite city. How many people in Zurich and how many in Mumbai were surveyed?

Asian culture is different from the western although I admit there are universal values of politenes like giving a helping hand, a friendly smile etc. The way we greet each other also shows our way of being polite. The Thais clasp their hands and say 'sawadi' while the Indians would say 'nameste' in a similar pose. The traditional Chinese would close one hand into a fist and place it in the palm of the other hand and would say some Chinese greeting. The Malays here would shake your hand while uttering the Arabic greeting and after shaking would touch their chest with the hand. I guess all these practices weren't important for these surveyors. The holding of the doors is definately a western culture.

In Asia the doors are open most of the time so there is no need to hold them. That is why most of the Asian cities failed miserably in that test. It was an alien thing. I have lived in Kuala Lumpur in 1975 and again in 1986. I didn't meet that many rude people then although there were some rude people at the bus station, inside mini buses and 'pasar malams'. This would not qualify Kuala Lumpur as the 3rd most rudest city in the world. The publishing of the results from this so called 'survey' is not fair to the Asian cities and definately not good for tourism. Personally I think this is some sort of sabotage by interested parties to divert the tourist to the Western countries.