[Back from hiatus]
I made friends with more Europeans and Americans last year
than with Indians – in Mysore! I have (had) always believed that the cultural
differences between peoples are only superficial, and to a large extent I still
do, but meeting foreigners who visit Mysore and having face-to-face
conversations with them vividly contrasted the behaviors of my own people against
theirs and helped me realize how I took some ideas to be universal that aren’t
necessarily so. Disillusionment was kicking in, and there’s not another feeling
that feels better.
As an Indian, you might be able to relate to many socially
awkward situations I can describe, but perhaps none more tellingly than the
awkwardness of meeting new people without being introduced and standing there
in silence, starting conversations with strangers, or just generally
acknowledging the presence of a stranger in the room. We have a hard time smiling
at people we see on a regular basis during the morning walk or the guy at the
grocery store. Avoiding participating in a conversation between strangers next
to us seems a better option than joining it. In short, we are an unbelievably
unsociable* people – and we let it disappear into the monotonous landscape of
life in India.
But a foreigner visiting India, to whom this unsociable
behavior is as foreign as the exotic birds of India, would be understandably
puzzled. Taking a historical, and later contemporary, perspective on this, I quote
here a renowned 18th Century explorer, Carsten Niebuhr, a very
perceptive traveler, who visited India and made these observations in Travels through Arabia and other countries
in the East (1792) [keep in mind that ‘s’ back then was written elongated
and almost made to look like an ‘f’]:
That observation, by the way, still rings true in some parts of
India. Some smug “upper class” gits continue to delude themselves into
believing they are inherently “upper” than the rest of enlightened India. I don’t
want to go on too much of a tangent, but a shit-for-brains, rabies-infected
doctor of pseudoscience (Ayurveda) had this to say at the 102nd Indian Science
Congress conference, an event that has come under a lot of heat for allowing
these revisionist tumors to present their talks at a science conference.
"...Sushruta is asking for credit to be known worldwide as the father of surgery". He argued that sophisticated techniques, such as corrective nose surgery, and the use of scalpels so sharp that they could "split hair", were lost because of the subsequent dominance of "certain religions". Also, he argued, "Buddhism's advocacy of non-violence gained such precedence that even the use of scalpels were considered to be violent and over time, surgery started to be practiced by 'lower classes' and they lost their refinement."
Anyway, getting back to the crux of the issue, Niebuhr’s
observations may not be true for the majority of educated India today, but it
does seem that our culture's demonstrable unsociability has strong roots in a centuries-old
caste system where people were precluded from socializing or fraternizing with
members of other castes. As time passed and civil rights movements were brought
to bear, these social edifices were demolished to an extent, but the
psychological grip they had on the masses wouldn’t disappear. They were too
subtle, and too embedded, to be noticed; it’s like a fish asking “what the hell
is water?” – the title of a famed commencement speech by David Foster Wallace.
Niebuhr also observed that Indians were very unsociable towards
foreigners as well. This I myself witnessed at two different places in Mysore
in the last six months. A European woman walked into a sweet store I was at,
and the two employees (both male) left in charge of the store, who were serving
me at that moment, prolonged serving
me as long as they could so they could avoid making eye contact with the
European or talking to her, and at one point I heard them murmuring and coaxing
each other to take that woman’s order – until she got tired of waiting and asked
if they would serve her or not (politely). Another quick incident was at my gym
locker room where an American visiting professor of considerable age said hello
to the locker room boy, and the boy just stared back at him with a solemn, blank
face, not smiling or saying hello in return. Apparently, smiling at strangers
is the most intolerable social sin you can commit in the rusting, crumbling
relic of a plague called caste system whose trail in the sand people still wish
to track.
This entire experience has convinced me to stay abroad, preferably
in a less rigid and more sociable European/American nation, for a few years so
I can contrast the default behavior patterns we take for granted in India
against a different, possibly better way of living and learning. Better later
than never, better late than later. But best sooner.
*Unsocial and anti-social are worlds apart. One can be
unsocial without being anti-social.
