The Unbearable Politeness of Being Indian

(With apologies to Milan Kundera for the bastardisation of his brainchild)

(Published in Zeitgeist, The New Indian Express, dated 18th October 2008)

"Could you kill the sharky for me, please?" my two year-old cousin from Birmingham looked up at me with an appealing face, and added, by way of justification for her murderous streak, "he is going to eat up akku and me. Could you save us, please?"

It was possibly the politeness of the request that got a hardcore animal rights activist to pierce the photograph of a shark ride at Disney World, and therefore save the two little girls grinning inside its mouth. As my cousin smiled and said, "thank you!" and trotted off to tell her parents the shark had been killed (and the photograph mutilated), I remembered a friend's dire warning, just before I had left for London.

"Never say 'yeah'," she had said, with all the drama of passing down a secret family recipe, "always say 'yes, please'." It turned out Londoners didn't care too much one way or the other, but apparently it was a big deal in the rest of the U.K., and somehow, I got into the habit of saying "please", "thank you" and "sorry".

I hadn't quite kicked the habit a few weeks after I landed back home, fresh from my year-and-a-half long stint, and so it happened that once, I asked my mother, "ma, could you bring me my coffee, please?"

"What's wrong with you? Why're you shouting? You just asked for it now, no?" my mother snapped.

And that's when I realised I had completely forgotten the rules of Indian etiquette. We only say "please", "thank you", "sorry" and "excuse me" when we are annoyed with something.

"Can you please do this, if it isn't too much to ask?!"

"No, no, thank you very much, I'll do it myself!"

"Okay, okay, everything I do is wrong! Sorry!!!! Happy?!"

"Excuse me!!! What do you think you're doing?!"

Having thought it out, I didn't quite blame my mother.

I tried to explain with, "no, I wasn't trying to shout. I was just requesting..."

"That's enough sarcasm!"

"No, ma, really..."And then my mother looked at me closely, and the familiar look of anxiety that accompanies the announcement of a cold or some equally serious ailment crossed her face.

"Are you all right?" she asked, in a milder tone than I had heard so far that morning.

Of course, we're quite justified in construing those four expletives as sarcastic, given we dismiss any attempt at politeness with "don't be so formal!" What is it about us Indians that makes us so resistant to politeness of any kind? We're known worldwide for our hospitality, but why do we reserve that for the expat population? The Iranians called it "tarof" and we call it "pehle aap, pehle aap." But surely, there is something that makes for a pleasant atmosphere all round when one addresses another with the respectful plural before being asked to switch to the informal singular, and when one asks before reaching out for a sandwich on another's plate!

The most annoying manifestation of sacrificing politeness for this all-important "informality" is this habit people have of stretching out their hands for a book you happen to be reading intently. You pretend not to see them, and then they, at best, snap their fingers in front of your eyes and go, "hello!!!" or, at worst, spare you the trouble and snatch the book out of your fingers. Then they look at the blurb, flip over to the back, read out three sentences, which, in keeping with Murphy's Law, will break the suspense that's kept you reading the book and finally flip their oily hands through the pages, leaving a couple of dog ears, before asking you, with this bright-eyed intellectual alertness, "how's the book?"

Having been victimised in this manner for more than a decade, I once replied with, "oh, I don't like showing books to people...I think of them as personal", to which my interlocutor responded with a grin, and the riposte, "then what do you like showing people?" I believe the problem where he was concerned was solved when I replied, "one particular finger."