Treatment of tourists in India

Are these articles exaggerating or should you be wary in India?

************************************************** **********

NEW DELHI : Foreign women in Delhi face worse harassment than their
native counterparts, especially because they stand out in a crowd.

Staring, catcalling, unwanted touching and even outright
propositioning are some of the actions that these women living in or
visiting the city experience.

An American student, Torea Frey, described an encounter with an auto
driver that made her think twice about how she behaved towards male
friends in public.

After parting ways with one such friend at CP, she hailed an auto that
was waiting nearby. The driver dropped her at her destination. But,
not before mouthing the word "sex" and indicating that she should
write her name and phone number for him.

"My co-workers told me that he might have thought I was a Russian
tourist who had run out of money and needed to sleep with people to
pay my way back. He was very insistent on getting to know me better,"
Frey said.

Many foreign women observe that men are overly friendly towards them.
But harassment by auto drivers or on a public transport is most
threatening because there is no possibility to walk away or duck into
a shop.

Not only do women from the US and Europe stand out, they also suffer
from the negative impact of pop culture images of white women as sex
symbols.

At a screening of Love Actually that Frey attended at a Delhi cinema
house, viewers laughed in appreciation of the American characters in
the movie: Women who slept around.

Later, when she was standing outside the theatre, someone grabbed her
posterior, though she hesitated to connect the incident with the
movie's portrayal of American women as "loose". "I just hate going out
in crowds now," she said.