To the food-stall boy in the streets of Calcutta, he says: 'Very good. F****** spicy!' The boy looks about 12. Yes, Gordon Ramsay has been on TV again, this time in a three-part journey around India, called Gordon's Great Escape. And naturally, he's as fond of the f-word as ever.
In this country, we have become depressingly inured to the wearisome and repetitive stream of expletives that flows from his mouth. After all, swearing at the top of your voice - whether on the bus, in the pub or on TV - is, I'm afraid, now a daily staple of British life.
So does it matter that Ramsay's style of English usage is now an export to the Indian subcontinent? Or does it make you feel more than a little ashamed of just how boorish our culture has become?
They're so polite!' he marvels at another point on his Indian travels. Yes, indeed. In India, as in most countries, relentless Ramsay-style swearing is simply not done.
Couldn't he try doing the same? Just for the few weeks of his whistle-stop tour of that beautiful country? If he really loved India as much as he claimed, couldn't he attempt to learn from India as well?
Of course, even the best behaved among us swear on occasion, and few of us are saints. In fact, you are unlikely to make it through a single evening of TV viewing without having the full gamut of expletives hurled at you.
But swearing still makes many deeply uncomfortable. It is, after all, language at its most violent and threatening. No wonder it is so disliked in India, with its millennia-old ideals of peacefulness and serenity.
On television there is still the watershed - just about - which means Ramsay in full flow can't be shown before 9pm, to protect British children. But for some reason, it was fine for Gordon's Great Escape to open with him swearing in front of a young boy in Calcutta.
Double standards? You bet. It's significant that Ramsay also 'dresses for India', in that condescending way certain Western travellers do - combat trousers, T-shirt and trainers. At one point, he wears shorts. In India, in Africa and in Latin America, only little boys wear shorts. Once you become a man, you graduate to long trousers.
How else does a man behave in these deeply conservative and traditional societies?
He doesn't jump up and down to show excitement, and he certainly doesn't lose his temper, as Ramsay does. To be an adult is to exercise self-control. Tantrums are for little children.
In Africa, I have seen a rich Western woman lose her temper over some minor difficulty in catching a bus, and the locals turning away from the scene, deeply embarrassed on her behalf.
How shameful for a grown woman to start screaming and shouting and going all red in the face over such a little thing as a bus being a few minutes late. How childish.
With Ramsay, though, temper tantrums and strong language are supposedly a sign of his passionate devotion to his craft.
Presumably, the idea behind Gordon's Great Escape is that he shouldn't have to change his behaviour for anybody. He is what he is.
So off he jets to India, with its dense and colourful tapestry of customs and traditions, and a civilisation with roots stretching back 5,000 years - and in he blunders, in exactly the crass way we have come to expect.
In Britain, we have become used to him massacring the English language. But on his Indian adventure, he appears not to have learned a single word of Hindi either. Surely he could have mastered 'Namaste' (Hello)?
But no. Instead, he takes his full baggage allowance of Anglo-Saxon expletives with him and starts spraying them liberally across the country.
He bellows at his under-chefs in a busy hotel kitchen in Bombay, effing and blinding at them in a way no Indian would dream of doing. They grin tolerantly and do his bidding.
In another kitchen, having already been told that none of his assistants speaks English, he stars shouting at them impatiently: 'Do you have any cling film? CLING FILM!?'
Does this bullying and bellowing remind you of anything? It reminded me painfully of the British Raj at its very worst, its most arrogant and ignorant late Victorian zenith, when purple-faced Englishmen marched about with swagger sticks and pith helmets, roaring obscenities at the natives for being too slow in bringing them their gin and tonics.
It made for very peculiar viewing - even for those of us who have become acquainted with Ramsay's antics back home.
There's no question that Ramsay can still be good entertainment, over-exposed as he is.
As well as swearing at the locals, we also saw him climbing a tree to collect ants' eggs (and getting stung), and diving for fish in the muddy backwaters of Kerala. He's adventurous and often likeably self-deprecating.
And, at times, the culture clash between the belligerent Scotsman and gentle India threw up some very funny moments.
There was a hilarious scene with Ramsay in a meditation pool. Ramsay's idea of peaceful meditation was to plough up and down the pool in a vigorous front crawl, while the Indians stood back, hands together and eyes closed in serene contemplation.
But his Great Escape also offered some less appealing images. 'It's not the easiest country for a Westerner to adjust to,' he observed at one point.
No, and he's not the easiest Westerner for India to adjust to either, when he's guffawing at a local in Kerala only half his size, with: 'You little f*****, making me look like a t***!'
A pretty lady at a banquet tells him in the politest possible way that his kebabs are OK, but could do with more spice. He tells her that she's being 'a pain in the a***'.
But perhaps the most gauche moment is when he meets an eminent chef in Lucknow. Approving of his cooking, Ramsay tells the chef's English-speaking son to tell his father that he's 'the dog's b*******.'
It wouldn't be ridiculously PC to have some slight sense of the culture in which you are a guest. For no, the son did not then turn to his father and translate: 'This visiting British chef says you are like dog's testicles.'
The dog is often regarded as an unclean animal in Hinduism, and certainly in Islam; and the chef was a Mr Qureishi, which probably meant he was a Muslim. Either way, this was a fantastically crude and stupid thing to say.
Gordon Ramsay's habit of relentless swearing is now regarded as so normal here that schoolchildren on the bus or the train talk, or rather shout, in exactly the same way. Such is Modern Britain. But this, too, would be horrifying from an Indian perspective.
The languages of India are somewhat richer and more imaginative than Gordon Ramsay's, and one especially tasty word is 'Junglee', meaning a savage or barbarian.
Some say it was originally used by locals to denote barbarous Englishmen when they first arrived in India in the 18th century, with their red, sweaty faces, muskets and loud, domineering voices. I'd imagine they found him again in Gordon Ramsay: Global Junglee Man.
Insensitive: Gordon Ramsay has been on TV again, this time in a three-part journey around India, called Gordon's Great Escape. And naturally, he's as fond of the f-word as ever
Ramsay in full flow can't be shown before 9pm, to protect British children. But for some reason, it was fine for Gordon's Great Escape to open with him swearing in front of a young boy in Calcutta
'It's not the easiest country for a Westerner to adjust to,' Ramsay observed at one point. No, and he's not the easiest Westerner for India to adjust to either
Polar opposites: At times, the culture clash between the belligerent Scotsman and gentle India threw up some very funny moments
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