u/Loose_Instruction411

I am 30 and have lived in Bangalore my entire life. One change that has become increasingly difficult to ignore is how exhausting something as simple as watching a movie in a theatre has become.

People have loud conversations throughout the movie. People push into queues the moment you leave an inch of space. Personal space seems nonexistent. People cough and sneeze openly next to strangers. Getting past someone apparently no longer requires saying excuse me. Phones come out during the movie with screens blazing.
And paying for a premium experience doesn’t seem to make any difference. I have booked expensive Director’s Cut tickets at Rex thinking the smaller audience and higher ticket price might mean a better experience. Same problems.

The controversial observation is that I personally started encountering this much more frequently as Bangalore’s migrant population grew, particularly people moving here from North India and the Hindi belt. That is an observation from my own experiences, not a claim that millions of people behave identically. Bangaloreans are perfectly capable of terrible civic behaviour too.

What I find interesting is how differently basic public etiquette seems to be understood by different people. If someone stands six inches behind you in a queue, they may genuinely see nothing inappropriate about it. If they talk throughout a film, perhaps they genuinely do not think they are disturbing anyone.

At some point this stops being about expensive theatres or premium seats and becomes a question of civic culture. A ₹1,500 ticket apparently cannot buy the one thing I actually want from a cinema: two hours where everyone shuts up and watches the movie.

Am I imagining a change that isn’t there, or have other people noticed cinema etiquette getting substantially worse?

I am 30, born and raised in Bangalore, and have been going to theatres here for pretty much my entire life.
Over the last few years, I have increasingly found movie going here incredibly frustrating. I cannot remember having to regularly shush people during movies earlier. Now it seems almost routine to have people carrying on full conversations during the film, talking loudly to the person next to them, checking their phones at full brightness, or behaving as though they are watching something in their living room.

Queues are another issue. Leave even an inch in front of you and someone seems to interpret it as an invitation to squeeze in. People stand almost on top of you rather than leaving the smallest amount of personal space. Queue jumping seems far more normalised than I remember it being.

Then there are basic courtesies. Someone sneezes or coughs right next to you without covering their mouth and carries on as though nothing happened. People push past you without so much as an excuse me. None of these things individually would bother me much, but collectively they make the experience unpleasant.

What bothers me is that paying more no longer seems to solve it. I used to think booking something like Director’s Cut at Rex and paying considerably more would at least get you a quieter, more considerate audience. It doesn’t. I have had essentially the same experience there.
I know the uncomfortable part of this discussion is migration. Bangalore has changed enormously, and my personal experience has been that I started noticing much more of this behaviour alongside the large influx of people moving here from North India and the Hindi belt. I realise that is a controversial observation and I am not claiming every North Indian behaves this way, nor that every Bangalorean has perfect civic sense. I am describing a pattern I personally feel I have encountered repeatedly.
Maybe I am attributing something to migration that is really a broader decline in public etiquette across Indian cities. Maybe Bangaloreans themselves have changed. I am genuinely interested in whether other people who grew up here have noticed the same shift.
Has cinema etiquette actually deteriorated in Bangalore over the last decade, or am I looking at the Bangalore of my childhood through rose tinted glasses?