Have Your Cake and Eat It with a Fork

To pass some time today, Principal Ramdev and I went across the street to D.A.V. school to say hello and share tea with the principal of the institution, Principal Yadev. D.A.V. is a school for first through tenth grades. The principal asked what I was doing for KLB, and Ramdev explained my cooking adventures and nutrition classes. He wondered if I could also do classes for the older students at his school. I agreed. Then he asked if I would be interested in also teaching table manners and etiquette. Completely different story.

In most of India, at least the traditional parts of it, you eat food with your hands. Everything. Utensils are a British invention that didn’t exist here up until a couple hundred years ago. So the average Indian meal of roti and vegetable, or rice and dal, is always eaten by hand. If you’re eating chapatti, one tears it into small pieces and uses that to soak up the dal or vegetable. You can also use your fingers to mix rice in whatever sauce or curry you are eating, and the same fingers are used to gather up chunks of flavorful rice and bring them to your mouth. Never bring food to your mouth with your left hand, because that’s the hand you use to wipe your ass. Gross. But basically, that’s the only table etiquette one must follow in India.

I had no problem adapting to all of that, and I guess it was so easy for me to re-culturalize, that when Principal Yadev asked me to teach table manners, I thought it was a dumb idea. What’s the point? Indian food is designed to be eaten with your hands, and putting a knife and fork into the equation just complicates things. Many people now use a spoon to eat rice, but aside from that, utensils sometimes don’t even make it into an Indian household. Even in the hostel at KLB, there are no knives or forks, just spoons. I just didn’t see any benefit to teaching kids how to use a knife and fork if most of them will never leave the country and therefore have no need to know Western eating habits.

Principal Ramdev explained that it all has to do with globalization (just like everything else, according to every social science class at the university level nowadays). Principal Yadev is trying to make his institution stand out from others. He is trying to give his students the tools and knowledge that they need to use in order to succeed in the future. Right now, that means Westernization. People around here are crazy about it. Anything that they can learn that is an example of American or European culture, they will jump all over it like a fat kid on cake. It doesn’t matter what it is; what matters is that they look more Westernized than the other guy at the job interviews. Employers here like that.

This trend can be seen at so many levels, it’s crazy. The most obvious is the Hinglish that is spoken by everybody that I mean. Token words like “actually, however” and “sir” are now key parts of Hindi. Throwing English phrases in your speech is practically expected. There’s a family with a lot of small kids who live in a house that’s on the way home from work. Every day that I walk by, the kids shout to me, “Happy Birthday!” Another example is Michael’s Café in Palampur. It’s a tribute to Michael Jackson, serving lousy pizza, brownies and veggie burgers. I wonder if the King of Pop would consider that to be a good tribute to his memory.

I agreed to do it. If Principal Yadev really wants me to teach students how to use a knife and fork, then what’s the harm? I just really disagree with the point and the purpose of the instruction. All of last semester in my cultural anthropology classes, we discussed the danger of globalization and how it may wipe out regional culture. Now I see it’s not a possibility; it’s a certainty. People around here gobble up anything Western or American without pausing to think about the affect it has on their local culture. It’s impossible to make a subjective judgment and say whether it’s right or wrong, good or bad. If they want it, if that’s all they know, then who am I to refuse it to them? It’s their choice, and trying to convince them that’s it’s wrong and that they should hold on to their own cultural identity would be just as bad as trying to make all the girls wear skirts and watch MTV.

As a result of my experience today, I have a new addition to the definition of globalization for all of my professors back at MSU. Globalization isn’t choosing Western culture over your own. Globalization is choosing Western culture because it’s the only one worth knowing. I just have one question: how can you eat chapatti with a knife and fork?