Courteous??

Mumbai has just been rated as the Least Courteous City by a survey conducted by Readers Digest. While the way they conducted this survey is vague, I think it does talk a little about the way cultures vary in the way 'courteousness' is defined.

One of the tests that RD was checking was if a person held out the door for the person coming behind. In India, no body would really think of doing this. We are all in such great hurry. I guess it was unlucky Mumbai was just polled for this. I dont think any other Indian city may have performed better (except maybe Bangalore given the number of techies who have gone abroad and seen this)

Anyway,the surprise is that New York was rated the most courteous. Given the size of NYC, I would have thought otherwise. But in this article NYC Mayor Ed Koch says that it may be after Sept 11. Do calamities change the way a city acts?
For example, Mumbai pulled itself together during the floods, during the bomb blasts in a way no other city could have done.

My take, is that,it is the quality of a mega city that allows it to become stronger in light of a calamity. To put it simply, people can not afford to get back to their lives as quickly as possible since it is a struggle to begin with especially in such complex ecosystems.

Final word would be that it was a little unfair the way this poll was conducted. and of course all news channels are also making merry out of it.