Today Ramona and I were talking about different cultures. Of course I have talked many times already about the differences in between Indian and Western culture and I have also said that there are many good and many bad things in both cultures.
We always invite our friends to visit us in India and when they come they have different ideas about how the culture is. They have an idea about how people think about work, about women, about spirituality and about time.
Many ideas are often right, if you see time for example it is true that it can happen that an Indian person comes half an hour or longer after the time that you agreed to meet at. And on the other hand there is the idea about Germans that they are rather more than punctual than being late and I found this, too, is true.
So there are many of these ideas which are right and in the same way some which are not really right. And these are some cultural differences. But the real culture you cannot get to know in this way. You cannot just tell anybody who will go to India for two weeks how India really feels like, how India works from the inside. In this way it is also not possible to describe it in words for you here in my diary. And it is the same for the western culture.
There are many prejudices that people have in India, too, and it is only by spending a lot of time here that I understood more of this culture. You need to spend more time with the people of a country if you want to get to know and understand the culture. And this is actually what we should do: get to know each other with much love and understanding for the differences with which we grew up.
Related posts
A few more Tips for Indians preparing to live in the West – 9 Jul 15
When Indians learn how to do shopping in the West – 8 Jul 15
Less Formalities make Life easier! – 28 Jan 15
How to fight Feelings of Loneliness – 12 Nov 14
The difficult Situation of elderly People in the West – 25 Sep 14
Joint Families are great – but not every old Person is made for this Lifestyle! – 24 Sep 14
The Culture of asking ‘How are you?’ without really wanting to know – 18 Jul 13
‘Wrong Number, Honey!’ – When American and German Cultures clash – 17 Jul 13
Has your bad Mood become your Habit? – 17 Sep 12
I think there are a lot of different ways of viewing time in the world. When people show up late tothings I’ve heard it said that they show up on “island time”, “Africa time”, “Mexico time”, And no “India time”. I think a lot of the world is less strict about time than the west. but the “western world” is pretty big too so, maybe it’s about half and half.
In my linguistics classes when we would discuss culture there were always one or two key telling principles that helped you understand a culture and the top one my professor always shared with us was how a culture feels about time and punctuality. It really does revel a lot, suprisingly. I find it so fascinating.