So to reiterate how different it is from household to household, just looking at acsenray’s posts:
We have no taboos about meat dishes touching veggie dishes, even though I was raised in a veggie household.
We have no problems with leftovers. Jeez, sometimes I felt like that’s all we had. Food went straight from being left to leftover, it seemed like.
I eat from my cousins’ plate all the time - well, the ones I like, anyway. In India it was considered kind of sweet for the American girl (er…me) to sit right down with her cousin-brother and eat off the same plate, asking for nothing special in return, and no special treatment.
I don’t think a simple washing with soap and water would be enough. Is there also a fingernail brush? I remember in high school biology we washed our hands and then then ran a toothpick under our nails and looked at the residue under a microscope. Ugh. It was disgusting with little creatures. I doubt many hand wipers wash throughly enough to remove all fecal matter from their hands.
I use paper to wipe and will do so until the paper is reasonably clean. Sure, maybe some trace is left behind, but I’d much rather it be there than on my hands.
I would wager that a washed hand of a hand wiper is dirtier than an unwashed hand of paper wiper. I’m amazed that they’d consider hand wiping cleaner than paper wiping.
I have seen people using fingernail brushes (or re-purposed toothbrushes).
But this issue isn’t really about scientific sterility, it’s about traditional notions of cleanliness, and from an Indian point of view, if you haven’t used water, then it’s simply not clean.
Um…well, don’t you wash your ass when you take a shower, too? And then what? Do you instantly use a fingernail brush? Cause I can tell you, there is no fingernail brush in my house anywhere!
But **acsenray **has nailed it - it’s all about what you perceive as clean. I’ve been trying to say that, by pointing out that I do not agree with their methods - I like the American way, but that’s because I’ve been raised here. If I had been raised there, I’m sure I would have a watering kettle next to my toilet.
You don’t need to wash *all fecal matter, actually. Avoiding bacterial death is all about dilution. You, yes you yourself, have traces of e. coli. in your eyes and your nose and your mouth right now. You also have staph and possibly strep and others on your skin. But, assuming you’ve washed your hands today, they are not present in high enough concentrations to cause you a problem.
Believe me, changing diapers, you get feces on your hands occasionally. More than occasionally, during bad weeks. You wash, you get over it. I don’t think CaveMamas had nail brushes. (Or diapers or wipes, for that matter.) When washing, your goal should not be to eliminate all pathogens (for that would be impossible, as well as not good from an immune-building standpoint), but to dilute them as far as practically possible.
As for your gamble about paper wipers vs. hand wipers and paper wipers having less bacteria on their hands, I don’t know if anyone’s tested such a thing, but I would lay large sums of imaginary internet money that the hand wiper who washes with soap and water afterwards (an important caveat, to be sure), has less bacteria on his hands.
And, if the argument is that your wiping hand is still not clean, well, that accounts for the rule that you’re not supposed to do anything else with your left hand.
Oh, and, specifically related to the caste system. A person of a lower caste is unclean. A non-Hindu has no caste and thus is the least clean. Very orthodox people might keep separate dishes for people who are not of their caste to use.
When I was traveling in India I had a lengthy discussion with some locals about the ins and outs of the caste system. To say it’s complex is an enormous understatement it was incredibly convoluted.
It began when I was in a village offering sweets to small children. You could see they wanted the sweets but were hesitant to take them from my hand, and I was instructed to put them on the table instead. At which point they swarmed around to get them, and were lovely and charming besides.
And it finished up with me being told that I was, in fact, considered lower than the lowly untouchables as I did not have any caste! That’s right, an untouchable touching me would become ‘unclean’ and have to go to temple and do some purification rituals. Yikes!
I learned, when I came home, there was just no way to discuss this with westerners - they just couldn’t get it, so I stopped trying.
Welp, I think it is really gross that Indians set their wives on fire, riot everytime a hindi/moslum get upset, bathe themselves in the nasty ganges, and can’t speak intelligible English when I call tech support, and when they can don’t know what the fuck they are talking about.
Operation Ripper. Yet another out-of-place post in General Questions! We haven’t had to warn you since, let’s see…July 20th! And before that it was June 28th…oh, wait, that was for posting insults in Cafe Society. Maybe it was March 30th…nah, that was insults in Cafe Society. Let’s keep searching. November 24th—Cafe Society again. Last September–wishing death on another poster.
These are the formal warnings. Along with your drive-by slams and out-of-place comments, it adds up to someone who doesn’t seem to care about the rules here.
So, I’m sending this around to the Mod loop for discussion. I’m also emailing this to you so you can’t say you weren’t aware of the situation.
Yes, because every one of us Indians are personally responsible for this.
I am glad to see you were warned. If you were banned for this I would not cry. I’m not going to return the insult, simply express my sadness that we apparently can’t talk about differences in culture civilly for even one day.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. If you, bett, were walking through the park, and fell, and your hand landed in a lump of dog shit, which would you rather use to clean yourself - you may only choose one:
Dry paper
Running water
Bottom line, wiping with paper leaves you with a fairly shitty ass, whereas dibbling away with fingertips at one’s anus while using water leaves your butthole clean enough to eat your dinner off (metaphorically).
Just returned from Thailand with a very clean ass, no hemorroids, and am seriously contemplating adding a Thai-style ass-spray nozzle to the side of my British toilet.
Of course I’d take running water in that case. But what if you had to chose between:
Having clean hands and a slightly dirty anus
Having slightly dirty hands and a clean anus
Which would you chose?
That’s my point. If they consider their left hand ‘dirty’, then even they are acknowledging that their hand is not really clean.
I have dogs, and sometimes when cleaning the yard I’ve gotten their mess on my hands. I’m surprised at how thoroughly I have to wash my hands so that the smell is gone. I just don’t believe that people would wash their hands thoroughly enough, including under their fingertips, to consider it an overall cleaner way to wipe. I’ll concede that theoretically it could be a cleaner way, but in the real world I don’t think it would be.
Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. It is unfortunate that bad apples exist, but I assure you, the input that you give and the patience you show in explaining a radically different lifestyle is exemplary. As I was reading “A Suitable Boy” you answered many questions for me and if nothing else, that book gave me a good glimpse into a culture that is darn near pathologically different than ours. Thank you.
As far as the outsourcing goes, I’m pretty sure this is unique in human history that people can reap the benefits of emigration without necessarily having to emigrate. Indians do not have to lose their menfolk to benefit from the United States economy. Kinda Neato if you ask me. Make tech support a PITA, but it will get better. It’s the ultimate telecommute. Now toss in some hygiene differences, caste, cultural groups, religion, diet differences, and by gosh golly, it’s amazing it works at all.
Serious question, do Indians who care about castes regard only their own castes as valid? For example, Kohens and Levites are the Jewish priestly caste. Would a Kohen be regarded by an Indian as priestly caste (IIRC Brahmin caste) or as casteless? Would a hereditary title of nobility (say the current ruling family of England) confer membership in the noble caste (Kaaritya? something like that)?
Many years ago I read that Indians are offended by Westerners scent of sweat in public transportations (that was before the era of deodorants). When travelling in Indian trains, I never experienced any offensive odors, unlike in some African countries.
OK, enough about The Bathrooms of the East. (Here’s a tip, you do not want to slip on the wet tile floor and fall flat on you back in a public restroom in Saudi Arabia. Trust me.)
What about the house of a strict Felix Unger-type Indian? No shoes inside of course, what else?
Is there a strong Indian prohibition against nudity? Walking in the house in underwear and that sort of thing?
your question isn’t fair–because nobody intentionally falls in dog shit.
A better question is : "if you were walking with your dog thru the park, and the dog shits and you have to clean it up, would you rather:
grab some toilet paper, and use the paper to pick up the shit
You misinterpret my analogy. It’s not about intention, it’s about what you do when you have sticky feces somewhere on your body.
There is going to be shit on your body after taking a dump - around your anus and buttcrack. Dry paper alone is going to leave some form smeary residue on your butthole - which, incidentally, you are going to touch anyway when you wash your ass while showering - whereas running water and a hand will get your ass cleaner. You do of course end up with a (lesser) residue on your fingers, but then you wash it off with soap - similar to what you do when you wash your dry toilet papered ass in the shower.