Litter and debris on Juhu Beach.
On August 29, broadcaster Gareth Cliff reposted a clip of Mumbai's Juhu Beach carpeted in plastic after a monsoon high tide and added a single line: he never wanted to go to India, "what a disgusting place".
The clip, first circulated by the account @RadioGenoa on August 28, shows joggers picking their way through rubbish on the sand. Within hours, the post had divided his audience and generated headlines.
The reaction was swift. South Africans of Indian descent called the remark ignorant and disrespectful to a country that carried the heritage of roughly 1,7 million of our own citizens.
Others noted, more gently, that one clip cannot stand in for 1,4 billion people, and that our own coastline is hardly a model.
