---
type: Tip
title: Be assertive with touts
description: Touts open with a friendly question rather than a sales pitch — once you recognise it, decline clearly or ignore them outright.
tags: [touts, scams, crowds, safety]
timestamp: 2026-08-06T12:00:00Z
---

# Be assertive with touts

Harry's warning is about the opening move: touts rarely lead with what they're
selling. They start with a conversational question — where are you from — so
that refusing feels rude. His rule is that the moment you realise there's a
sale behind it, decline clearly and early, and that ignoring them outright
often works better than engaging politely, which he admits is his own habit
and not the more effective one.

## How Harry applies it

At the entrance to [Old Delhi](/places/old-delhi.md) the touts were lined up
waiting, and the $10 bill Harry was carrying for his thumbnail drew immediate
attention. He gives the advice directly to camera there: as soon as you know
they're selling something, be assertive, say you're fine, or just ignore them.

He has since refined it into something less blunt. Working the souvenir lanes
by the Golden Temple in [Amritsar](/places/amritsar.md), pursued by a shopkeeper
who would not accept a refusal, his summary was to be persistent and to kill
them with kindness — and he is careful to say the man was forceful rather than
rude, and that "please" is genuinely hard to refuse. The other half of the same
lesson is linguistic: the one phrase he tells a first-time visitor to learn in
India is *I don't want it*.

He also names his own failure mode. On his first trip he kept agreeing to visit
shops he had no intention of buying from, because saying yes was easier.

## Demonstrated in

- [Crazy $10 Challenge in Delhi, India 🇮🇳](/videos/abnAQ26UKlY.md)
- [I got Kicked out of the Golden Temple for this 🇮🇳](/videos/MpZUcxh4q7g.md) —
  the kinder version of the rule, and the phrase to learn.
- [Rawdogging the Scam Capital of the World 🇪🇬](/videos/eRS4cYl0e9s.md) —
  where Harry states the problem this page exists for: Egyptians do not take no
  for an answer, and he says he has never met a nationality like it. His method
  in [Cairo](/places/cairo.md) is not to get louder but to stay pleasant and keep
  repeating the same sentence — which is how he gets his 150 in change back off a
  perfume seller who would rather give him another bottle.
- [Underground Moroccan Massage Hits the Spot 🇲🇦](/videos/mPixwjP8LgQ.md) —
  the medina in [Casablanca](/places/casablanca.md), where his summary is that
  sellers are persistent without being aggressive: they want you inside the shop
  and they will not stop asking. His method is to keep saying "maybe later" and
  keep moving, and he confirms the walk-away works here — while noting it works
  less well than anywhere else he has tried it.
- [Avoid This Pakistani Man! Karachi Airport Scam 🇵🇰](/videos/zvonmD1TIIE.md) —
  **where declining clearly and early is not enough**, because the ask is not a
  sale. Leaving [Karachi](/places/karachi.md) airport, Harry and
  [Mac](/people/mac.md) said no to a porter and carried their own bags the thirty
  seconds to the taxi; the porter followed, asked for money at the car and would
  not leave, and Harry paid 200 rupees to end it.

  **The distinction is worth holding on to.** Everything else on this page is
  someone trying to sell you something, where a clear no is a complete answer. A
  claim for work you declined and did yourself has no sale to refuse, and Harry's
  own summary is that the amount was trivial and the principle wasn't. His stated
  limit — *if I kept giving money out to people randomly I'd have no money* — is
  the only thing on this page that is about the total rather than the encounter.