speaking loudly

Indians are wont at times to speak rather loudly to one another. Now i am not using the phrase ’speaking loudly’ as an euphemism for arguing, and this is precisely the subject of this short post. It is a widely received idea that nations in warmer climes usually tend to foster choleric temperaments, northern climes producing rather phlegmatic ones; and this is then held responsible for the observed fact that southerners argue and shout more than their, say, scandinavian counterparts do. I wish to propose a somewhat modified version of this theory, one according to which it is not so much the climate that is directly responsible for indians shouting at one another, but that it is rather their close quarters and especially their tight social bonds that are the immediate causes of such expressive outbursts.

To stoop down to the age-old hydraulic metaphor: social pressure is so high, because exerted from just about all sides, that people must incessantly let the steam out by raising their voices at one another. This allows them to both grade the importance they attach to their statement (something northerners do through other means) but also to assert their social position within a very tight and regimented pecking order. By shouting, the southerner creates a necessary and healthy distance between him/herself and the other, a distance which is precisely neither physically nor emotionally permissible and must thus every now and then be vocally called forth.

Blackouts

Please notice the new “Blackouts” tab above. This will hopefully be a source of some interest, great merriment, little enlightenment and perhaps even a bit of schadenfreude to you all.

breakfast

The brand new gas regulator on my one burner stove leaks less than the old one, so that i’ve been able to indulge my educated palate with light and smooth darjeeling tea for a few days now. This morning i purchased a loaf of (best quality) white bread, four bananas, three deep-red carrots, two handfuls of green beans, a dozen eggs with sundry black and brown markings upon them and four ramen maggi noodle soups. As soon as i locate a plate, fork and knife i shall boil two of the eggs, unpack my two-in-one salt shaker/pepper grinder which i received for xmas, toast the bread and eat my first breakfast meal of eggs on toast, which i expect to become a staple of my expatriate diet.

more pictures

I spent saturday and sunday visiting the Ramakrishna Mission down town and having a picnic at the water treatment plant (which was, contrarily to what you are thinking right now, dear reader, quite a nice and restful place). Of course i did my best to immortalize all this with my handy little Sony Ericsson 2 MPixels cell phone.

The Ramakrishna Mission is one of these particularly indian institutions, which easily and calmly baffle the western mind. It is an ashram, ie a not-for-profit institution dedicated to furthering the teachings of a specific philosopher/religious leader (the distinction between philosophy and theology is not really relevant on the sub-continent – but (much) more on that in a later post). The mission has a wonderful library to which i was not granted access for lack of two postage stamp-sized pictures of myself. The small museum was offered as a suitable ersatz. Assuming that indian IP law with respect to museum exhibitions follows the laudable precedent set by the pharmaceutical industry in this non-aligned nation, and decisively strengthened in my presupposition by the lack of curators or any other human beings in my vincinity, i allowed my little camera to do a little bit of what it was meant to do:

From India

The second series of pictures documents my sunday outing to the Indira Gandhi Water Treatment Plant (warning: very boring link) where a friendly family invited me to spend the day with their friendly mathematician friends of 30-odd years. Time went by at just the right speed, allowing for tea, breakfast (@12.00), the singing of bengali & english (sound of music) songs, the tiniest little bit of dancing, badminton, dinner, tea, the lodging of the badminton shuttle in a spider web up high between two tree branches & the final retrieval of the shuttle after much throwing of stones, sticks and selves.

preliminary unscientific reflections on hospitality

I have not read the great works that have over the centuries concerned themselves with the idea of hospitality and can thus only speak from my limited, though not entirely uninformed, experience; moreover, the following musings mean only to prepare the way for more careful thoughts, which hopefully will ripen during the coming months.

Hospitality, to my knowledge, must go back as far as civilization itself and might even have been one of the first forays humankind attempted into non-kin morality. At its crassest and most essential level, hospitality was probably no more than a shaky agreement among two strangers to not insert a roughly hewn flint dagger into one another’s sleeping backs. As most human institutions, it would then over the years have blossomed into a multitude of attendant rules and conventions that attained its glorious pinnacle when the institution became something of a religiously sanctioned, even holy, duty towards any and all breeds of foreigners who might come knocking on one’s door in the middle of the night.

To get down to my personal experience and the events that precipitated this post, i will look into current practices of hospitality in india and the US. India still seems to abide by an older rule of hospitable behaviour, one that requires rather stringent adherence to specific regulations, namely and primarily those pertaining to the eating of food. A host in india will do her (and at times his) very best to over-feed you, nagging you with refills and springing new and unforseen dishes upon your already weary and overflowing plate (which you are usually holding in your hands while sitting on a couch, a situation that decidedly impairs your ability to instinctively defend and protect said plate with your bare hands). Even when it has become painfully obvious to all present that a given guest is patently satiated, the host will adamantly insist upon supplying more food, while all othery coyly look on, as if one of hospitality’s rules of thumb — that a guest will probably be hungry and refuse to eat all that he or she would actually like to — had been taken much too literally and applied without regard to the dreadful specifics of the situation at hand. This might not be quite “torturing one another with food” as i had some days prior unceremoniously baptised this (not only) indian habit, but it does strike me as missing the point of hospitality by more than a handful of rice.

The american equivalent to this culinary hospitality, the famed “my fridge is your fridge” invitation, actually seems to hit the mark much more accurately. Though i would never venture to assign an essence to the idea of hospitality, nor even to describe its principal features, i feel confident that in this specific case my intuitions do not fail me entirely. Making someone comfortable should, by anyone’s book, rate higher than making them uncomfortable, and unless my powers of perception have remarkably dimmed in the kolkata smog, the hands-off approach to feeding your guests is much less likely to induce some variety of premature death than will stabbing them with carrot sticks.

Two low quality videos of my place in Kolkata

part one (my cell phone only makes 30s movies):

and part two:

i’m not a director and i had to work with the actors on hand, but i dare say we pulled it off as best we could. i will certainly try to improve my cinematographical abilities over time and hopefully not only at my audience’s expense…

first pictures of india

India