Cultural observations

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Mrs. Large is an MS patient. She was diagnosed at the age of 35, sometime in 1970. She was married and had young children when she was informed that she probably would not survive the disease, and that on her way to death it would blind and paralyze her. Understandably upset, she did a lot of praying and fasting, and received a vision that she would found an orphanage for Indian children in 1975. On telling her husband this, he tried to have her committed for a mental evaluation, and his family completely cut her off. She was told by both his and her family that she would receive no family support for what everyone thought was a delusion brought on by stress and the disease, and they were uniformly unsupportive of any proposition that would take her away from her own children when she may only have a few years with them left. Undeterred she began working on reservations for Native Americans, since she had thought that those were the Indians she was supposed to help. A few years later she met an Indian man who said that the need in India for every sort of help was enormous, and she realized that India was where she was supposed to set up her mission. She had never been to India. In 1975 she founded her first orphanage in Chennai, comprised largely of children found abandoned in the streets. Her husband would not come to India for nearly 10 years, until the early 1980’s. When he arrived and saw the place that she had set up he supposedly said that “for the last 15 years I thought she was crazy, but now I see that I am the one who is delusional.” Anyways, I am usually pretty skeptical about these type of religious phenomenon, but there is no denying what an incredible place this is.

Since the students from York left I have been immersed in the r.ural culture of Andhra Pradesh without the protective encirclement of other Americans. What I have found are two competing themes, the first being that this version of Indian culture is different at every point from American culture. The second is that it doesn’t really matter, they’ve been as easy to befriend and have fun with as if I were with people back home. For example (these are specific to rural Vizianagram district of Andhra Pradesh and not a generalization of all of India):

The people here eat with their hands. There is a specific way that they do this, by forming a shelf with their four fingers on which the food sits, putting nearly their whole hand in their mouths, and then pushing the food in with their thumbs. I don’t know how this is taught or learned, but even the youngest children eat this way. They claim that they can only be satisfied if they eat with their hands. I spent a few days learning to eat in the proper way with my hands, but then Mrs. Large saw me and exclaimed that westerner’s do not have the immune system to handle eating with our hands. I wanted to tell her about how I had sucked on coins as a child which had served to immunize me against all disease and give me the immune system of a bull, but she wasn’t having it.

The food is almost entirely rice and curry, occasionally with some chicken or fish mixed in. When the other students left and I started eating the same thing the Indians ate, I also discovered it is unbelievably spicy. By the end of most meals I am drenched in sweat and hyperventilating (much to the laughter and/or concern of my hosts), and I usually need 45minutes to lay in my bed and recover after every meal. They were in total disbelief that in the United States most Americans eat either cow or pig almost every day. Most have never had either, don’t know what a sandwich is, and have never had pizza.

At meals they don’t have cups. Instead they share a pitcher of water. They never touch the container to their lips, instead they pour the water into their mouths. This has been true everywhere I have gone in India--the people never touch their mouth to the container. Nobody has been able to explain to me why this is, though several have asked why I drink with my mouth touching the bottle and I don’t really know either.

They are obsessed with Cricket and have no concept of baseball, basketball or football. They thought I was joking when I didn’t know what a Wicket or Over was, or how the game is scored. They were skeptical that nobody in the United States plays Cricket, the idea that there is anywhere on earth where people don’t play is unfathomable.

They throw trash everywhere. This is true all over India, and is to me the single most obvious difference. It is absolutely normal to drop your trash, whatever it might be, right where you are standing. If the boy scout motto is “leave no trace,” India’s would be “dump shit everywhere.”

They have arranged marriages. Several of the girls here have known for several years whom they will be married, even if the marriage is a few years off. It is arranged by family members, in the case of these orphans usually an aunt or uncle. Occasionally there are “love marriages” but these are frowned upon because they lack the support of the family which is much more important here than in America. I have been told numerous times that love marriages usually don’t last, but that arranged marriages usually do. When they asked if love marriages usually last in America I had to admit it was about 50/50, at which point they asked why I thought it was so strange that they wanted better odds than that.

One day I was asked “How does it work if a man and woman have sex before marriage?” I didn’t know what he could mean by this question and responded “I think it is biologically the same as when married people do it.” What he meant was if there are any repercussions. My response that it is not uncommon or even necessarily looked down upon was met with total shock. They were even more shocked when I said that I would marry a woman even if I knew she had been with a man before me, to them this was bordering on the absurd. “What happens here if unmarried people have sex?” I asked. This was met with some serious head wobbling/shaking and “they either get married or they die” “yep, dead, no doubt about it” another one said.

Men and women do not show affection publicly to one another, even when they are married (this is not universal, I saw affection in a park in Hyderabad). Instead it is very common for men to hug, hold hands, and dance with other men. Mike, one of the York students, received an intense lesson in this. For some unknown reason every day all the teenage boys wanted to hold his hand all the time, and they would grind on him provocatively when certain music would come on. Several times he nearly broke down, and back in the room we shared several times he stated he wasn’t sure he could take another day of all the man on man affection. Fortunately I have been spared. When this came up in conversation I told them that American men don’t show affection to one another, and that I probably would not even hold my eleven year old brother’s hand now that he is getting older. They thought this was ridiculous.

I was invited to participate in a prayer group at 8:30 in the evening by one of the girls. When I walked into the home one of the staff nearly had a heart attack saying that it was scandalous for a young man to enter the home at that “late” hour, even though I had a perfectly reasonable reason.

They have never seen snow, in fact the weather we have now of mid 70s is considered cold. At night when it drops into the 60s they wear ear warmers and jackets. I showed them pictures from the blizzard in DC last year and it was beyond their comprehension.

They could not believe it when I told them that in America many, if not most, people have guns in their homes. Most here have never seen a firearm. Additionally they apparently receive very long jail sentences for hunting local deer, and were surprised to find out that deer hunting is one of the major American social activities.

They have a fundamentally different view of risk that is hard for me to understand. For example, the boys play cricket outside their home everyday. Once in a while an old woman (several ancient women wander around the compound, I can’t figure out what they do and nobody really seems to know who they are) will just walk through the game. They don’t stop the game, they just play around her. This would be like if an old woman wandered into the infield during a baseball game and nobody noticed. Things like this happen all the time.

They do not form lines, at least not willingly (neither did the Egyptians).

It is rude to say thank you or apologize. They say it creates distance and is okay between strangers but not between friends or family. I never realized how ingrained giving thanks or at least acknowledging another person’s service is in American culture until every time I said “thanks” for something the person would look at me like I killed their puppy.

Whenever I ask people for advice about traveling through their country they uniformly say “don’t trust anyone, Indians will lie and cheat you without even thinking, never trust anyone!” It is strange to me that this is how Indians would describe people from their own country, though I appreciate the advice.

These are just the basic things I can think of off the top of my head, the list could go on forever. Today is the halfway mark of my journey. Tomorrow I leave for Chennai, then Pondicherry, and I will hopefully be in Trichy on February 1.

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