I was, like a lot of sane people, appalled at reports of men urinating on women during long-haul flights from Paris and New York. Experience has taught me that the wait for a lavatory while flying can sometimes be excruciating, but I couldn’t understand why the men couldn’t hold it in. What was harder to fathom is how their inebriation didn’t allow them to urinate on male passengers. There will be inquiries and a lot of questions about how the airline’s employees handled this, and what they could or should not have done, but what we should ask ourselves is whether any of us was genuinely surprised hearing about these incidents. I wasn’t, because of a long-held belief that Indian men are the worst travellers on the planet.

No flight to or from India is without incident, even if the incident isn’t necessarily traumatic for passengers. It begins with a casual disregard for rules and stays that way until the seatbelt sign is switched off. The reason we accept this as normal is our acceptance of bad behaviour as intrinsic to our culture. We laugh it off as a quirk, instead of identifying it as the abnormality it is, and the horror it is treated as by people from most other countries. Speak to an air hostess about the entitlement of Indian travellers, and the tales may horrify even the most jaded among you.