Three videos of Indian tourists were widely circulated on social media recently. In one, a group of Indian tourists breaks into garba on the tarmac of a Vietnamese airport, dancing in what is a tightly controlled operational area, requiring ground staff to intervene. In another, Indian visitors to Hanoi’s famous Train Street perform Chaiyya Chaiyya for Instagram, the caption says, if you didn’t do Chaiyya Chaiyya on Train Street, did you even go? And thousands of miles away in Arizona, the US Forest Service seeks help identifying tourists accused of carving their names into Cathedral Rock, a site sacred to the Yavapai-Apache, Hopi, and Navajo nations, protected under federal law, four young men, laughing the whole time, not particularly bothered that they were being filmed.The incidents are unrelated. Together they have reignited a familiar question: Why do Indian tourists seem to be acquiring this reputation of entitlement?The easy answer is that millions of Indians have become rich enough to travel internationally without necessarily acquiring the habits, assumptions, or civic norms that global travel demands. And what the world is witnessing is the export of India’s social order.The Chinese tourists arrived firstFor years, Chinese tourists were the world’s preferred villains, accused of shouting in museums, ignoring queues, littering heritage sites and treating foreign destinations as extensions of home. This escalated to the extent that the Chinese government published a book, Guidebook for Civilized Tourism, in 2013 after a young man carved his name into a 3,500-year-old Egyptian relief. Eventually, China adapted. The gradual normalisation of international travel reduced the frequency of such stories.India has now entered a similar phase, and the comparison is simultaneously correct and incomplete.Indian outbound tourism has exploded. What was once the preserve of diplomats and the upper-middle class is increasingly accessible to millions. The new Indian tourist is not the Oxbridge English-speaking Diplomat from Delhi or Calcutta. He is from Rajkot, or Patna, or Hisar, and he saved for this trip, and he is going to get everything out of it.This thesis is also incomplete, because China’s tourism problem emerged from sudden prosperity alone. Ours emerges from sudden prosperity filtered through a society shaped by hierarchy, scarcity, low trust, and an intensely transactional relationship with status. The Indian tourist problem has roots that go further down.The caste in the roomLet me say something that will antagonise a lot of my friends, caste facilitated thinking runs through us like an underground river. Whether formally acknowledged or not, social life remains organised around hierarchy, status, entitlement and negotiated privilege.In a caste society, you are not an individual unit accountable for your own mess. You are a member of a hierarchy in which someone below you has been ordained, by birth and by dharma, to deal with what you discard. Your role in social order does not include accommodating anyone else, this is also why we will so often find our dads and uncles listening to loud videos sent on WhatsApp without headphones at home and other public spaces. Because in their head the space is not shared as much as owned by them for the time they are there.In a caste society, pride exists where guilt should. You spit the chewing gum into the airport urinal not because you are a bad person but because, somewhere deep down you already know that cleaning it is someone else’s headache.Take this logic overseas, remove the someone else, and you get Cathedral Rock.The othering in casteThere is another related consequence of living inside a caste order that rarely gets named directly. It trains you, from birth, to not fully see “the other”.In a society organised by hierarchy, the out-group exists at the edge of moral consideration. The cleaner, the waiter, the person whose function is to serve your experience without interrupting it. You do not ask his name. You do not consider his day. He is infrastructure, not person. This is not a failure of individual character. It is a feature of the system, reproduced so efficiently that most people inside it cannot see it operating.The Vietnamese airport ground staff who had to stop the garba circle, did anyone in that group think of her as a person with a shift to finish, a supervisor to answer to, a set of regulations she would be held accountable for? The cafes and homes lining Hanoi’s Train Street, whose residents have to negotiate their daily lives around an unending stream of tourists treating their neighborhood as a theme park, did the Chaiyya Chaiyya group register those residents as people, or as backdrop? Cathedral Rock is sacred to communities who have been fighting for the recognition of that sacredness for generations. And the four men chiseling into it perhaps did not know that they were performing, in miniature, the same gesture that empires perform on the cultures they refuse to see. In their mind they were just having fun at the expense of the other they never considered.This is where the Indian tourist diverges most sharply from his Chinese predecessor. The Chinese tourist problem was largely about volume and unfamiliarity, too many people, too new to global norms, the friction of a society that had been closed suddenly opening. The Indian tourist problem has this layer, but underneath it is something much older – a trained incapacity to register the full humanity of the person outside your circle. Basic respect, as a default orientation toward strangers, is not a value that a caste society installs. It is, in fact, almost exactly what a caste society is designed to prevent.The trust deficitPolitical scientists have long noted that India is a low-trust society. The sociologist Dipankar Gupta has argued that India possesses communities but struggles to build citizenship, the primary unit of loyalty is family, then caste, then perhaps the village, with the abstract stranger very far down the list. Francis Fukuyama’s work similarly distinguishes societies where cooperation extends beyond kinship networks from those where trust remains confined to familiar groups.In a low-trust society, civic behaviour becomes almost irrational. Why stand in line if others will not? Why preserve public property if nobody else does? Why sacrifice personal convenience for collective benefit when collective benefit is largely fictional? Rules are not universal obligations but obstacles to be negotiated. To see whether one can get away with doing it.Add to this a state apparatus that was, for most of living memory, extractive rather than protective. When the government is something you survive rather than something you participate in, civic compliance begins to feel like a personal loss.The public tarmac at a Vietnamese airport is about as abstract a stranger as it gets. The red rocks of Sedona are not anyone’s family. Why should one then care about them?The philosophy of paisa vasoolWhat the average Indian experienced, even when we were supposedly “sone ki chidiya”, was scarcity of food, safety, legal protection and the simple dignity that comes from knowing tomorrow will resemble today. Scarcity leaves marks. It produces a relationship to abundance that is fundamentally anxious, get it while it’s available, consume it fully, do not assume there will be more. This is the psychology behind the airport tarmac dance – we paid for this trip, we are going to extract maximum joy from every inch of it, and the Vietnamese ground staff will sort out the rest.Now take this mentality abroad. ‘Paisa vasool’ is not just a phrase for getting your money’s worth. It is a way of looking at the world. We are always on the lookout for the extra buck. This can produce extraordinary entrepreneurialism. But it can also produce the Mumbai influencer couple who empty the hotel bathroom’s body wash dispensers into plastic bottles to take home, captioning it: free chiz dekhi, wife ka Marwadi radar turant on. It produces the tourist who sees Cathedral Rock not as a sacred thing to be encountered but as a surface available for inscription, name immortalised means full paisa vasool.The reel economy makes it worseThe social media attention economy gave our behavior a reward structure, and a global audience. The garba on the tarmac was as much a dance as content. So, was the Chaiyya Chaiyya. We feel the need to perform extra just to convince ourselves that we are having the best time. This is not uniquely Indian; the attention economy does this to everyone. But the particular combination of scarcity, anxiety and low civic trust means that when the reel incentive is layered on top, the results now travel further and embarrass harder.The Chinese tourist problem largely resolved itself as travel matured from aspiration into habit, as the need to perform it diminished. This may happen with Indian tourists too.Let’s be clear, our embarrassment lies not in the fact that Indians are travelling. It lies in the fact that many of us still treat travel as conquest rather than encounter.There is a version of this essay that ends with a call to action, civic education, cultural sensitivity training and the responsible tourism lecture. That essay is not particularly useful, because those things are downstream of the actual problem, which is structural, old, and not amenable to a pamphlet. And we all know what that problem is.Raj Shekhar is based out of San Francisco and works in the area of data privacy regulations. He also occasionally contributes as a freelancer writing on politics and runs a podcast on politics called the Bharatiya Junta Podcast.