Getting to Know Some Indians
By Gabi. Filed in India |
So many negatives have been posted, that I feel I must highlight the positives of our trip to India. There were many people that are really nice and helpful. In the meantime, through varies readings, I began to realize that they have a high sense of curiosity, which we may find overwhelming. Their constant questions of where we were from may actually have been a way to get us into conversation. They probably aren’t able to engage with foreigners and we are somewhat of a curiosity, especially for people that have never been out of their city. Not many tourists go off the beaten tourist track. Most do what we did the last couple of days, hire a taxi and drive point A to point B and back again. But… this really isn’t a way to see a country. What we did before is really more at the ground level. Our patience just needs to get better.
We met a wonderful waiter and the head barkeeper in our hotel in Jaipur. We engaged in an exchange of customs in the countries. It is amazing how strongly they feel about family, and I don’t only mean immediate family, but the whole extended clan. The men feel responsible for all the males and females, and would always support them, if need be; but they would never expect to take any favors from their female relatives. Ex… The barkeep had a brother , whom he was helping out because he had turned ill. He, himself, had wishes to go to the US to work. His sister lives on the Westcoast with her husband. He would not think of asking her for help to get to the US, even though she could easily vouch for him. It all has to do with those strange ideas of inequality of the sexes here.
Both men were waiting for their mothers to find the right brides for them. They said it was more of a union between 2 families, not only 2 people, so the in-laws really had to agree to the match or it would never work out. Do the future pair have any say, well yes, the man does. He sees pictures of possible future brides and is allowed to nix a couple, solely on their looks, or what the parents tell him about the future partner. They said love marriages did exist, but had to be approved by both sets of parents. This weekend there was a double suicide in Delhi because the parents wouldn’t approve; the couple figured this way they could possibly be together in the next life. Ooh, we told our new friends, that we would have had trouble with our love marriage because neither set of parents were excited about our union. We showed them!!:twisted:
We asked about the hand holding custom of the males. They said, that the males were just friends,. You could see they were really uncomfortable with that type of situation. When we told them, that same sex people were allowed to get married in some western countries, they couldn’t believe it and thought they really must be crazy in those lands. They wouldn’t admit that homosexuality existed in India. I think we saw a lot of it. I wonder if this could also be because there are so many fewer females than males here, the statistic was 950 women to 1000 men in big cities, and 750 women to 1000 men in towns and the country. Why so few women?
Many reasons, parents abort female fetuses because males are preferred, females die during childbirth, at an astounding rate and many more educated females, hit the road out of the country, where they can be equals.
Next came our culinary lesson about Indian spices. We learned why all the dishes were so spicy. Cooks pride themselves in getting the greates flavor out of a mixture of particular spices. They usually use 3-4 and not only cook it in the dish but rather prepare the spice before adding it. Preparation can take various forms but 2 that seem to be favored are: 1. pre-cooking the spice in oil, 2. grilling the spice. These processes are suppose to bring out all the flavor……….. if there are different peppers, cumin, mustard seed, etc., you can figure out what this means for the final dish. AARgh–HOT
The bar keeper then enlightened us with his knowledge of herbal medicines. He ran off what herb, or spice, or tea, one should use for any possible ailment. In a better restaurant, after a meal, one gets oregano or anisette kernels as a digestive. Then there are small pieces of rock sugar to take away the taste of the the previous.
The staff in our home away from home, in the Delhi Hotel were really wonderful. On our return from our excursion through the neighboring province, they welcomed us back with large smiles and conversation about our journey. It was a small hotel, so we always felt well taken care of by all the staff. Our neighborhood in Karol Bagh, a section of New Delhi, was actually a relief from Delhi as a whole, because here, we could almost walk around like everyone else, only the rickshaw drivers were looking for their foreign victims.:roll: After a couple of days we had our neighborhood restaurant, our internet cafe, and our mini-market scoped out. We became repeat customers and were greeted as such.
Thursday, February 17th 2005 at 5:56 am |
Good to see some positives!