Attitudes towards them are paradoxical. What is good about them is also simultaneously bad. Typically, they are commended and condemned for the same thing in the same breath at the same time. When commended for their unity and willingness to help and support one another, they also stand condemned at the same time for their clannishness and even racism. Even as they are praised for their sense of thrift and financially disciplined lifestyle, it really turns out, at the tip of a forked tongue, that these are euphemisms for selfishness, greed and parasitism.
Indian pride is boastfulness and conceit.
They cannot be trusted. They often achieve success by employing questionable means to attain their goals. Even as they are talking nice, nice to you and smiling in your face, they ll be quietly stabbing you in your back. Such profound, powerful contradictions mean that the Indian community in Trinidad is little understood or seriously misunderstood by those who presume to judge them. On the basis of these confusing and contradictory bits of knowledge, we separate ourselves from them and fertilise suspicions and distrust about members of the national community without the benefit of objective, sustained, close interaction.