I guess there’s a difference between bathing on the ghats vs actually going in the water properly (having been to Varanasi and done that - I admittedly didn’t see many of them actually going beyond the very edge)…

But also, there’s over a billion of them. If you’re from some middle class family in Delhi, say, which is pretty much desert, you’ve very likely never spent much time near the water…

And wealthier families rely on servants to do things like teaching their children to swim (hypothetically), so… It’s not that surprising, to me.

When I was over there, I very, very rarely saw the locals go in the rivers. That was, unsurprisingly, mostly tourists like me and my friends…

But beyond that, all Australian kids take swimming lessons. They’re mandatory. So we all learn to swim. Which is logical in a country where 80% of us live on the coast. And where freestyle (Australian crawl) was arguably “invented”…

As a result, when you get migrant families that don’t have the same experience, this is gonna happen…

All of which is to say, perhaps putting “Can you swim to save your own life?” on citizenship tests is arguably not that unreasonable…

It won’t happen of course, but it’s not that… Outlandish.