Rishikesh, Uttarakhand: An Australian tourist posted a video showing India’s less-known early morning street cleaning tradition, which sparked a conversation about how India is shown on social media.
The traveler, whose post was shot in Rishikesh, published a brief video on Instagram of a committed sanitation worker crouching by the side of the road and cleaning a drain with his small cart parked beside.
The text that went with the film directly went against the pattern of viral travel content: “Tourists will post reels showing how dirty India is, but they won’t show you the street cleaning in the morning.”
A Call for Fair Representation
The Australian woman wrote in her caption that foreign visitors often look for and share unfavorable pictures about the country online for their own benefit.
“Many tourists come to India just to show the ugliest parts of it. “They do it for the shock value, the likes, and all the followers they can get,” she said.
She told other tourists to look at things from a different angle, saying, “I’m not denying that India has problems with garbage collection and disposal, but there’s really no need to sh*t can a country for views or followers.”
She went on to talk about how distinct the country is, saying that India is “huge” and has “many different states that are all different from each other.” Things would not be the same in every part of India. She said that the place where her video was filmed, Rishikesh, “was very clean.”
Good Feedback Online
Many readers liked the message since it tried to fight negative stories online.
One person who commented that it was nice that the traveler looked on the bright side, saying, “India is a very complex country and there are a lot of amazing things among the not so good things.”
Another person said, “Propaganda won’t like it,” which suggests that the stuff that goes viral is biased.
Many people also said thank you, as one person who wrote, “Thank you for showing the good side of my country.”
A commentator added a geographical note, saying that outsiders who travel “more than just Delhi or Mumbai” will only really comprehend the country’s diversity.
The movie is a reminder that there are many unrecognized efforts by local communities to maintain their towns clean behind the highly shared and often critical messages on social media.