India is the country John Kiriakou names when asked for his least favourite of the places he has worked. He spent about six weeks there, based in Hyderabad, and is unequivocal: “I really don’t like India at all.”[1][2]
Not the poverty
Kiriakou is careful to disqualify the obvious explanations. He describes it as the filthiest place he has been — “I’ve been in filthy places before. I’ve never been in a place as filthy as India” — but immediately sets that aside as the reason: “I’ve been in worse places, poorer places, more dangerous places.”[2]
What he objects to is social rather than material: “the thing that I hate the most about India is the way Indians treat one another. It’s shocking to me, this caste system that they have. It’s shocking.”[2]
The driver
The example he gives concerns a driver assigned to him for the six weeks — “a really sweet guy, wife and two little kids at home” — earning perhaps a hundred or a hundred and fifty dollars a month, and available around the clock.[3]
Kiriakou had been warned before leaving not to over-tip, on the grounds that it would “ruin it for everybody else.” He over-tipped anyway, and accepts the charge that he set a standard others would then have to match.[3][4]
He then invited the man to lunch at the restaurant inside the hotel where he was staying. They agreed on one o’clock. Kiriakou waited — “1:00, 1:15, 1:30. Where is this guy?” — then went outside and found him standing there.[4][5]
“I’m sorry, sir, they won’t let me in.”[5]
The reason given by staff was caste. Kiriakou objected that the man was his invited guest, and escalated to the manager, who repeated it. His final appeal — “I’m a guest in this hotel and I’ve invited him to lunch, he’s my friend” — got the flattest possible answer: “I don’t care who you are. He’s not coming in the hotel.”[5][6]
The second refusal
Furious, Kiriakou got in the car and asked to be taken to the best restaurant in Hyderabad — the city being famous for its biryani. The driver took him to a converted Victorian mansion from the British period, the finest place in town.[6][7]
The manager’s ruling was identical: “You can come in. He can’t come in.” After some argument, the compromise reached was a table set up outside.[7][8]
Asked whether this was really being done by Indians to other Indians, Kiriakou confirms it, and adds the part he finds least tolerable — that it is unremarkable: “To their own people. And this happens every single day.”[8]
He allows the country exactly one concession, offered without elaboration: “The food is very good, though.”[9]