Demystifying India: part 2

Read the brief intro about the series in previous post.

Eating style and practices
The another not properly understood topic about Indian culture is the Eating habits. Many people in met during my Brazil trip had an understanding that Indians don't eat Beef (cow meat) because of sacred reasons but other meat is fine. For a country like Brazil or Argentina (as I was told) vegetarianism is a very rare concept. To some extent people would claim that you can't survive there without meat or that you will only be eating fruits and raw veggies. As you can read on my post on Brazil this was not so.

So the question about Indian not eating beef: Well, again there is nothing like an Indian religion, we have people of multiple faiths and religion in India and all of them have different sacredness rules about food. The Hindus (the majority as can be unambiguously mentioned at time of writing) don't eat beef. Before I go to other religions its a point to be mentioned that Hindus themselves have many more sub-groups which have varying levels of restrictions beyond beef. For e.g the Brahmans and Vaishnavs don't eat meat at all.

The Muslims similarly don't eat Pork/Pig meat (In fact the rules are more strict to include only halal meat), I don't know of any eating restrictions in Sikhism and Christianity, which are the next 2 major religions in India. My family follows Jainism which is another religion. Jains are considered part of Hindus in a broader categorization which counts only 4 major religion, but we have much different guidelines as far as food is concerned. Jains follow restricted vegetarianism mean they don't eat some veggies for e.g root vegetables. I realized reading wikipedia that some Jains have follow Veganism.

As you would expect most of these are religious guide lines and people follow them to varying levels. But one thing to understand is that while Vegetarianism is pretty common in India veganism is not so common. So for most people milk, milk products and cheese are very regular part of the meals.

Eating by Hand.
A friend of my host in Brazil was probably shocked and puzzled to see that I was eating Tapioca with Knife and Fork and the underlying debate which was in Portuguese lead me to think I was expected to be eating with hand instead.
This particular debate was difficult to handle as I didn't really understand the reason of eating with hand except that some Indian food really is most easily eaten with hand like Rotis(Chappatis), Naan(bread) and Dosa much like Sandwiches and Burgers. For other food like Rice the eating practice is very regional and matter of choice again. My father insisted us to learn to use spoon to eat rice pretty early in childhood (you don't usually need fork and knife for vegetarian food) and thats very typical way of eating in formal dinning or parties.

That said many people do eat rice and curry with hand and its very common in authentic southern Indian eating style to do so. Of course people adapt themselves according to places and situations, and therefore the eating style becomes western when you are in the west.

Coming to the reasoning part of it, I have found couple reasons as I searched on the net, one is what I commonly heard earlier that you can enjoy the food most when you eat with hand[1], [2]
It should however be noted that strange as it may sound people in India were pretty well aware of "Washing the hands" and similar hygiene even before people in the west started bothering about them due to Swine flu. Its very much part of the food habits to use soap or such to wash hands before eating food specially when you  are not going to use cutlery.

Demystifying India: part 1

I have decided to start writing about this at multiple times in past but felt very strong motivation during the Brazil trip, so here it goes. I am going to try Demystifying some things about India as country and Indian people, to remove some myths and misconceptions and citing some similarities and differences with other countries/cultures in this series of blog posts.

How it started
As I was traveling in Brazil I came to know that people in Brazil (not necessarily Brazilians) had seen a Soap Opera which was based on India. Apparently the whole show was a big hit there and people had developed a great interest in Indian culture to the extend that Indian clothes and Indian music sounds like a hap thing.

This sounded cool in the first impression but as we become better friends I heard the real curios questions from the people. "Are you a Brahmin ? Are you very religious etc." and then some one showing some Bharanatyam steps and asking me to tell them more about Indian dances :).I quickly understood the series has yet again done the same thing many outsiders do in portraying a country, they mix all hetrogenous parts of the culture and apply them on one family and it feels like thats the typical lifestyle.
(Of course I have seen Hollywood movies and series and spend time in US to have an idea of this disparity).

So, bewildered as I was, I thought "Am I a brahmin?" probably second time in my life, the first being when I came to know there WAS a caste system in India. Nah, I cudn't judge if I was or not :)

About the Caste System
As against the first general impression people had/have, no modern India doesn't really have caste system practices of differentiating people in terms of discriminating them or bounded labour or whatever the caste system implies.

As it happens with the Surnames/Last names in Scotland or some other places its more like a symbolic or historical concept for most of us now. Like Scott Shoemaker doesn't mean Scott makes shoes,
Being a Brahmin doesn't mean I am priest or a very religious person anymore so does being a Kshatriya not enforces you to be a warrior :)

Of course there are parts of India which are socially backwards and backwards in terms of development and these things horrible as they are, are still practiced to various extends. Some would claim it means discrimination in terms of opportunities but as you would imagine there are laws against such acts. On the contrary the government encourages people who have been oppressed in past because of their caste to come to level playing field by reservations of various kinds.

Which of course is a debatable process of its own.
But the point is, when I studied in a school in a relatively small city of Jabalpur (may fall in top 30-40 cities) I never cared for my classmates' caste. We all had same privileges and opportunities. So was the case in my undergrad and post grad college in Hyderabad (a pretty important city) no discriminations but just merit based evaluation based on your performance. Taking further when private companies come to college for hiring the same thing goes on.


About Hindu/Hindi the Religion, the culture, the language
The friends from Argentina who had developed some interest about India was always confusing the use of word Hindu/Hindi/Indians and India :) as many of these should be very related but are not same.

Unlike most other countries India doesn't have a small set of Languages which everyone in the country knows. So as you talk to different group of people you most definitely end up learning more than one language. A good example I always tend to give is that when I joined my college most batches would know three languages 1. Their Mother Tongue, 2. Hindi and 3. English (not in that order always).
As you would realize Hindi is not mother tongue for a big percentage of Indians. In fact many of us may not need to learn/use Hindi all our life. This seems very contrasting to one Language countries like Brazil (pr), Argentina (es), USA and UK (en). etc. Another example of the diversity, when I joined my job my team of four people the only common language between any two people was English.

So yes, Indians don't always know Hindi, the language. Some people however use the word Hindi to mean the people of India. All I can say is that with all such diversity and recognition and respect for all religions, languages and backgrounds, calling Indians Hindi is inaccurate, though we may have such references in old writings and songs like one song says "Hindi hein hum" (Hindi we are).

Now Hindu, well Hindu is a word for a person following the religion of Hinduism like Catholics are people who follow Christianity and its relation with Hindi is almost same as that of Christianity with English. In most sense Religions aren't geographical while languages are. So all Indians are NOT Hindus, we have a diverse set of religions too! Of course all this makes India very different and interesting from many other places in the world.

More to come in next post on the series ..