Are we friendly to each other?

I am sure each one of us has heard about incidences where foreigners, especially westerners, asked us some questions about India that are genuine from their side, but amusing to us. With a large number of jokes on this theme, it is hard to say which incidences are genuine and which are not. Long back I myself have been asked "Is there telephone in India?" from a person who was working with people in Indian every day. When they visit India, they ask different types of amusing questions. One such person had asked me "Why are footpaths 1 foot higher than the road here?" and just then a 2-wheeler zoomed past us on the footpath. On the positive side I did not have to answer his question :-)

While most of the questions asked by westerners are just funny, sometimes you get a questions that makes you think long and deep. I faced one such question recently. We were a small group at the lunch table with our European guest. The topics of discussion were the usual. The guest was asking us a few questions about how things work in India. He then asked a question that startled us. "Wherever I have been in Bangalore, people have been very friendly to me. Are Indians naturally this friendly to each other or are they being extra friendly to me?" I tried to explain "I suppose the people here realize that you are from outside and might need some assistance with various things, so may be they are being more helpful to you". But the man persisted "No, I am talking about friendliness, not being just helpful. For example, are you as friendly to each other as you appear to be to me?" Now there was a silence at the table for a few seconds, while we were thinking how to answer this. Luckily, it turned out that the group at the table was indeed quite friendly to each other, so we just told him "Yes we are". However, this left me thinking about whether we are we really more friendly to our visitors than we are to our own folks.

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 an extra step or two 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 Americans 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 guess we are not. But then, when we see someone from another state/city who is totally lost and needs help, we are likely to go an extra mile to help them out.

On the other hand, we also regularly hear about people from out of town, including foreigners, being duped, mugged or even murdered for gains. This too happens all over India. All of us would have experienced that when we are not in our home town we are much more likely to be cheated one way or the other.

So 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.

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