Are you this friendly? Really!!??

I'm sure many of us have heard of incidents where foreigners, especially westerners, have asked us questions about India that seem genuine to them but amuse us! With so many jokes floating around on this theme, it is sometimes hard to explain which are genuine and which are not :-)

I myself have been asked so many such questions when I was in Europe long back for some project work. The questions range from "Why are footpaths a foot higher than the road in India?" to "Is there telephone in India?" (this coming from a person who was working with people in India every day)!!!!

While most of the questions are just funny, some do make you think. I faced one such question. We were a small group at the lunch table with our European hosts. The topics of discussion were very casual. Suddenly the host started asking us a few questions about how things work in India. Then he said - "Wherever I've been in Bangalore, people seem to be very friendly to me. Are you guys really this friendly?" Initially we were all startled at this question. A friend said - "May be the people in Bangalore realized you needed some assistance with various things and were more helpful to you". He said - "No, I am talking about friendliness, not just being helpful". After glancing at each other and realizing that we were indeed friendly to each other,I said - "Yes we are". However, this left me thinking whether we are more friendly to our visitors than we are to our own folks. Are we?

I suppose foreigners indeed think we are more friendly to them, possibly because of the way we interact with them when compared to how they interact with us when we are in their country. May be we do go that extra mile to make them feel comfortable. As far as friendliness is concerned, I think we are much more friendly to each other within our personal network than they are among themselves. To an extent we do that with any outsider to our cities or home, although we do not say "Hi" to total strangers as those Americans or Europeans do. However, are we as friendly to someone from another state/city who we personally don't know as we are to a foreigner? I can't say!!I can only conclude what we already know: No rule can be generalized to all of India. This makes it difficult to say "This is how we are". That's what makes our country so interesting I guess.

For the record, the "foreigners" that I know are mostly from western countries, mainly US and Europe. I am not very familiar with how people from other countries behave.

Why do I bother?

I visited my blog after a long time today and after looking at the date of my last post, wondered why do I even bother to write!! Well...after a lot of thought, here's what I think it is about...

Until relatively recently, people only had a few books to read – the religious work, an almanac, a devotional work or two – and they read them over and over again, may be aloud and and mostly in groups so that the traditional literature could make a deep impression on their consciousness.

But may be after the printing press appeared, things began to change gradually. For the first time it became possible for people (even ones without great wealth) to have a small library of sorts in their own homes.

Today, I feel, we read books extensively (both hard and soft copies) without much focus and, with rare exceptions, we read them only once. May be, we have no choice but to keep up with the changing and broader culture. Not may of us make any serious effort to remember or understand what we read.

We read and read and read, and forget and forget and forget. 

So, I ask once again...why do I bother?

May be to compensate a little for the weakness of my memory did I adopt the habit of writing so as to have at least some general idea of what "it" is and what I thought of "it". Probably, synthesizing a thought on what a book, a movie, a specific trip was about, and writing it down, makes the experience itself richer, more memorable. I still don't know!!!