I've just come back from a neighbouring country that lies to the east of us. The internet situation in that land being slow almost to the point of non- existence on some days, I've missed out on what has clearly been an eventful ten-day period.

Whatever may be happening in the 'real India' reeling under drought and heatwave, the headlines that trickled through to me all had to do with the controversy around the Ambedkar cartoon and the one video clip I managed to see showed Madam Didi Mamata Banerjee losing it at a young college student who asked her an uncomfortable question during a TV show.

Looking at what's going on in our desh from the noisy west is one thing: some of it seems hilarious, some of it feels quaint, some of it feels like it's the future being played out, of whichever praant of the Occident you are visiting, but somehow all of it seems connected to wherever you are. Sitting surrounded by trees and foliage, by humidity and cloud formations same to same as home, looking west instead of east, all the recent Indian brouhahas seemed just plain bizarre. Who were these people? Who was this woman screaming from a stage and yanking out her microphone before flouncing off? What was this strange, badly drawn cartoon from sixty-odd years and what were this cross-fire of reactions occupying so many of our 'leaders'?

The country I was visiting was suffering from a close cousin of the same heat-wave battering the Indo-Gangetic plain. Yet the people on the streets of the main city showed none of the anger and heat-aggression I'm so used to at home during April and May.

Contrast

Like here, people crossed roads at all points and not just at traffic lights, but, even when they had critical mass, the pedestrians waited for a gap in the traffic before moving. The cars slowed a bit when confronted with the clustered jay-walkers but didn't stop. People just wrapped themselves around one vehicle and then the next till they were across. The driver of my large, fancy van never once used its bulk or poshness to push into traffic; he waited, politely, as the slowest and rustiest of the old 80s Japanese cars clanked past before making his way forward. I heard the horn being used in anger once, just once, in the ten days I was there. The other time a driver honked was on a hill road when approaching the blind curves. It was hot, it was humid, it was crowded, it was 'third world' with the capital T we've lost in our cities decades ago, but people were unfailingly polite and thinking for the others around them as they navigated the public spaces. People may push past you but they will never push into you and through you.

Make no mistake, the country I was visiting only looks placid on the surface. It has had a tumultuous and violent past, and the last half a century has seen brutal repression and bloody protests. Things are changing now, but you can still see stangely peeled open cross-sections from seventy, sixty, fifty, forty years ago: in architecture, in transport, in the way people work things, in the way they interact with you. But, despite all this, you get the feeling that all sides, each with their different visions of what the future country should look like, all of them subscribe to this quotidian calm and civility. Whatever people may want, they don't seem to want to become the ceaseless meta-brawl that is our India today.

Going there and coming back, I was routed through another of our neighbouring countries, Thailand, or rather through Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi airport. Now, unlike the people at my final destination, the Thais have had recent and intimate contact with Homo Indianicus and it shows in how they interact with us. It starts from the moment you board the Thai Airways flight. The air-hostesses are friendly but watchful, especially if you are a desi male. The serving crew are, dare I say 'normal' with other, western foreigners, but preemptively firm, almost brusque, with us brownies. The announcement includes a warning that alcohol will not be served or be ceased to be served to anyone who shows signs of being drunk (although I suspect this warning is also meant for the Chinese men). Normalcy is switched on only when they confirm that you, desi-man passenger, are not about to start groping them or fall about drunk.

At the airport, the shop staff also have a certain look when they see you browsing the goods. In the middle of a series of calculations from bahts to dollars that I'd asked for, a shop assistant snapped at me 'I already calculated that one! You did not see!' Call me over-sensitive or Mamatanoid but I just didn't see him speaking to a European like that. Later, when I returned to the shop and made a purchase, things changed.

The same man was almost oily in his unctuousness once he saw the colour of my debit card confirm chit. 'Shukriya!' He said, smarmily. 'Noworries, mayte!' I replied in my best Melbourne drawl, just to confuse him.

Hindustanis

On my way back, after ten almost totally Indian-free days, it was a jolt to be standing in a 'queue' (more a dhakka-dhakki melee) to board the flight to Delhi. Here we were again, a crowd of Hindustanis, mostly north Indians, pushing and shoving and looking to slip through before our seat number was called. Again, the irritation on the faces of the ground staff was plain to see - an Indiabound flight was clearly a mini hardship posting you had to put up with to draw your salary.

On the plane, a familiar sight: people stuffing the overhead lockers as if escaping with all their worldly possessions; others spreading themselves, capturing maximum seat space in the narrow economy rows, kids shouting at parents, parents shouting back, everyone blocking everyone as they made themselves as comfortable as possible, the service crew standing around with that 'what can you do with these people' look on their faces.

Cultures

Even as I was cursing our many different desi types, I remembered a brief encounter with a fat and cheerful Chinese man I'd just had at Bangkok airport. The man plonked himself down next to me as I was surfing the net on my laptop in one of the smoking rooms. He lit up and smiled at me. I smiled back. He leaned over, attached his large shoulder to mine and began to go through the contents displayed on my screen. After a moment, he began discussing the different bits, touching my screen with his thick finger and shooting away in his own tongue, completely un-bothered that I understood not a word. I put up with this till my cigarette finished and then I got up, prising the computer away from him. The man laughed at me, I laughed back.

It was the classic behuda behaviour of a large man from a large country: Americans have one version of it, Russians another, and, I now realised, so do the Chinese and we Indians. The country I visited and the Thai people are both caught between the two large, thuggish cultures of China and India and I find myself worrying for them, that they too will have to become crude and crass to stave off our joint depredations. In the meantime, with the background noise of two middleaged laundas from Haryana arguing with the air-hostess for more vodka, I shut my eyes and prepared to re-join the meta-brawl by trying to remember the most calming of all the many different Buddha images I'd just seen.