This India That India

I spent a good amount of time reading a series of comments triggered by a post about Chennai. I'm not from Chennai but have a few million relatives there. I spent many summers of my childhood there in a conservative family so have very limited happy memories. But I love the beach. And Chennai to me, is like any other city in the world. It has its up-sides and its down-sides.

But this post is not about Chennai. It's about whether there is indeed a cultural difference between people from one part of India and another. When I was younger, I went to a sort of elite college. It's now much more elite than it was then (but that's a different post), and even back then, we had people from all over India. My friends to date, are not all from a single place. Some of us speak Hindi fluently and still get made fun of, and some of us speak Hindi badly despite having lived in Delhi for years. Is that even an issue? A cousin of mine is married to a girl who grew up in Chennai though her family is from North India. She is so fond of Chennai that she actually loves the weather! I guess one could safely call her a Chennai-ite.

Of late though, in my professional life, I've run into many people from other parts of India. And I've had to resist the temptation to brand/stereotype. I don't believe it's cultural, but I do see a tendency for people from Delhi to try to beat the system. This has taken on a slightly personal tone for me, one that I'm grappling with.

A colleague of mine is from Delhi. We didn't have much interaction due to work, but we began hanging out because the women in my office are few and far between. She's sweet, dil-se. But she's very... brash, full of herself and willing to do jugaad. And I no longer respect her. She's been very sweet, said I've made her respect Tamilians more, understand Tamilians more, she's bought me gifts for no reason... and I don't want to speak to her any more. And when I don't want to speak to someone I become snarky. I've had to watch myself, because she's a nice person, but it's getting harder. I felt especially offended when she proudly announced that the highlight of a shopping trip was gypping a parking attendant of some amount, by pretending that she'd just come out of the shop that maintains the parking. This is mainly because I've been wrongly accused of the same and been all righteously indignant, but how does one fault a parking attendant? He can't keep track, and she knew that what she was doing was against the rules. Yet she did, not just unrepentantly, but proudly.

This is what I see growing, an attitude that 'getting what you want' matters more than abiding by rules/norms etc. And that is the India that I abhor.