“So how much do you make?” my friend asked. I froze. This was a particularly delicate moment – a fully loaded gol-gappa was on its way to my mouth and now I had to deal with this. I deliberated. The gol-gappa is unique because it lets you pick your recipe on the table. You assemble the dish based on exactly how you like it and viola you have the prefect snack. Once it has been “watered” there is a very short time before it turns from crunchy to soggy. I was in that critical time span and now I had to deal with this. Regretfully, I placed the gol-gappa back in the plate and replayed an oft given response, “Enough to get by”. My college friend, who I was meeting after nearly two decades wasn’t having any of that. “Oh, come on. I am sure you make more than that. How much? 1 lac dollars? 2 lac dollars?” he said helpfully simplifying it to a multiple-choice question. I reflected on the difference in privacy standards in India and US. Asking one’s salary is almost taboo in the US. I remember a colleague of mine in the US was bemoaning she had no idea how much her then boy-friend made; and this was after she had moved in with him. However, in India it is almost treated as an ice-breaker.
Why are privacy considerations so different between the two countries? This was personal privacy. What about physical privacy? In India it is not uncommon for straight men to walk with arms draped over each other’s shoulder or even hand-in-hand. In crowded elevators, strangers will come and stand suspiciously close to you. In the US, in this situation, you may as well hang a sign around your neck about your orientation. Yet my first visit to the gym in the US had me shocked as I saw grown men lounging around completely naked. While I have not visited any gyms in India, I very much doubt that this would be acceptable there.
What aspect of the culture engenders this difference? Is it because, compared to the US, India has 3 times the people living in 1/3rd the land, and this congestion makes privacy untenable? Or are people in India more open, transparent and trusting while those in the US more secretive and distrustful. My experience does not quiet substantiate either perspective. There are many aspects in which Indians are a lot more conservative. People in the US will freely talk about their relationships, colleagues will talk about family challenges and personal aspirations, strangers will talk about parents and siblings and new parents are more than ready to whip out pictures of their kids. Indians tend to be reserved in all these matters, even if asked. Yet they will probe you about your finances, peer over your shoulders to read your passport at airports, read your messages on the metro and attentively eavesdrop on your conversations.
To a great extend I find that this is coming from a platform of childlike innocence. I think Indian culture still preserves the not so ancient culture of communal living, where everyone lived in small, tight-knit communities, helping and supporting each other. Sharing of personal information and space was a way to cement these relationships. The US was established by colonizers, entrepreneurs and adventurers where individualistic enterprise was the basis. Preserving personal space and information was a matter of survival.
Perhaps what we see are vestiges of these disparate attitudes. As Indian society is getting more and more westernized, I do see people being more aware of personal boundaries. But the family units are becoming more nuclear, the “me-first” notion more common and the divide between the haves and have-nots widening. Not sure if that’s a good thing. Food for thought. Talking about food, back to my now soggy gol-gappa!
