The Glowing Sign of True Democracy
A small act is a window to the pseudo-democracy in my country
Many years ago, fresh out of school, I got to spend a whole day with a stranger in Mumbai. He was from New York. He had been traveling for a year; India was his nth country. He greeted me on the deck of a small cruise, and it went off from there. Talking to a stranger is uncustomary in our country, so I found it unusual to begin the conversation.
I have always found Westerners welcoming to unknown people, places, cuisines, or situations. This is how a traveler is supposed to be in non-native land, curious to absorb the place by being open, I reasoned.
It’s always difficult to mix up with strangers in our culture.
Until I lived in the U.S.A. It was my first day in Washington, DC. Someone passing said ‘Hi’ to me. I reflexively returned the friendly greeting. When he had passed, I looked back to check. Did I meet him earlier? Not so! The friendly exchange with a total stranger left me a little puzzled.
Why would a stranger offer me a warm ‘Hi’? It is a wonderful day, and people want to share their enjoyment with others, including strangers, I thought.
That is one part of it. But there is more to it than that.
Barring the occasional bouts of arrogant aggression, most Americans are among the most friendly people. And it’s not limited to greetings. People are always kind enough to give the first right to passage to walkers with a broad, cheerful smile. In a mall, restaurant, or jogging trail, I always felt welcome.
It could be a way of life to have strangers pass by you with a greeting. Being a newcomer coming from India, I found this a charming change. In urban India, at least, we seldom exchange greetings with people we don’t know. An unsolicited greeting is not only confounding but can also be easily misunderstood.
It may have its own socio-cultural reasons rooted in our upbringing. As children, we are told to keep away from unknowns. This advice has its own merit and can’t be wished away. Part of the reason for its current interpretation is premised on our absolutism — total avoidance of strangers — and part on our socially defined protocol for extending salutations.
From my early childhood days, my parents taught me to touch the feet of elders. Be it an uncle, aunt, grandparents, or anyone close to our family on an odd visit, the protocols are strict and definitive.
Even when I was a toddler, people of the lower cast would prostrate or touch my feet, as ordained in our religious books. In my village, even elders touch our feet because of our superior caste. Such rules are cast in stone, especially in rural India.
By and large, your age, social status, or seniority in office earns you the same right. Even in the swankiest offices of the best-studied and sophisticated workforce of a multinational company, the formal greeting is forwarded by the subordinate.
The senior may extend a passing greeting at will, but a junior is expected to. This is a garlanded expression of the same caste system that is looked down on by educated people.
I once overheard a supervisor formally complaining to HR about the insubordination of an employee; one of the factors that he counted was “he doesn’t greet me in the morning”. The perpetuating part is that HR didn’t ask him back, “So why don’t you greet him first”. These norms are deeply ingrained in our collective psyche.
To a Western audience, this may sound silly, but here, even in corporate settings, such trivial issues can cause professional rivalry. In the US and other parts of the Western world, the exchange of greetings is part and parcel of what could be called everyday egalitarianism.
In India, such exchanges are subject to an implicit social hierarchy, the signature mark of our stratified society and a symbol of underlying feudalism. What is the meaning of equality, respect, and dignity if the passing of a gesture of goodwill is ritualized? Or, even worse, turned into an impression of authority.
Such social orders are responsible to political parties to divide people into ancient caste equations and to keep objective issues at bay. By keeping this feudal culture in our minds and habits, we are doing a disservice to creating an egalitarian democracy. The tokenized, ballot-box democracy must end.
So next time you exchange pleasantries with a passing stranger, a jovial ‘Hi’, you could very well be saying a ‘Hi’ to streetside democracy.