What the West gets wrong about India | Culture | Arts, music and lifestyle reporting from Germany

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Despite being home to 1.38 billion people, the average Indian — for much of the West — remains a dorky, bespectacled engineer who’s won spelling bees and speaks in a strange accent.

India celebrates 75 years of independence from British colonial rule on August 15, and Indian talent and culture have swept across much of the globe — from yoga and spirituality to the CEOs of multinational corporations like Google and Twitter.

Yet simplistic portrayals of the country still dominate many minds in North America and Europe.

Here’s what people often get wrong about India:

Indians and Hindus are not synonymous

Starting with the basics, India is a diverse country with several major religions, including — but not limited to — Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism. About 2.9 million people also identify as atheists, according to the 2011 Census of India.

In India, the language and culture can change every 50-100 kilometers, with a simple “hello” changing from “namaste” to “sat sri akal” to “assalam alaykum” in a two-hour-long drive. Each state has its own primary languages, along with hundreds of dialects.

Beyond the ‘Indian accent’

In a country this diverse, it is impossible to have one “Indian accent” — unless you’re talking about chef Manish Mehrotra’s iconic establishment that finds itself on the coveted “Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants” list.

For the uninitiated, Mehrotra’s “Indian Accent” restaurant has branches in New York, London and New Delhi that touts “global Indian food, not Indian Indian food” as the chef himself described it to the South China Morning Post in 2018.

With English being the second-most widely spoken language in India, according to the 2011 Census, it is often used as the medium of communication between a Bengali speaker from the eastern state of West Bengal and a Malayalam speaker from the southern state of Kerala.