232. India: Dropping and Picking Up Things
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| Indians are by nature respectful of cleanliness |
Toilets are not the only things that separate the East from the West, dropping and picking up things also are a means of divergence.
I remember when I was a school Prefect at High School in Walsall I paraded the corridors with eyes wide open to make sure pupils did not drop things on the floor. Usually it was sweet papers, but you also got the occasional snotty hanky and other personal goodies like chewed chewing gum and the likes. I would jump on the culprit with a strong “Pick it up!” barring his/her transit backwards, forwards or sideward.
I also remember when I was in the convent, if another sister dropped something, it was considered a curtsey if we picked it up for her. This kind of gentility, if I well remember was also extended by a great number of gentlemen in England who also picked up some object dropped by a lady. We also know such objects were dropped on purpose in order to form some kind of acquaintance between the dropper and the picker up: pre-Victorian and Victorian romance is full of such episodes.
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| Getting a taste of home life- some believe one must live "natural"- I'm not sure I agree |
Of course in India, if you walk through the streets, you, as a Westerner will find it distasteful that people just drop any old thing on the floor; it irritated my sense of a dutiful prefect, no end. I remember being in a taxi and the lecturer next to me, opening an envelope, just threw the bits on the floor with the carelessness of someone who had no sense of civic responsibility, respect for other people`s property or the person sitting next to them, me.
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| Civic Responsibility is not a school subject? |
So why on earth is the sense of putting our own rubbish inside our pockets and taking it home, or to the nearest bin, so ingrained in the West (at least in most of us) and is of no consequence in the East?
Next blog- from an Indian point of view (but not all Indians)
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