Day 47 ~ How Not To Be An Ugly American

Travel teaches toleration. ~ Benjamin Disraeli

 Yesterday I mentioned that one of our fellow travelers asked our tour guide some questions that I believe were so culturally inappropriate as to be offensive. It started when we passed the Tower of Silence, a walled-off wooded area with a tall stone platform where pall-bearing practitioners of the Parsi religion take the bodies of their dead so their bones will be picked clean by the birds and other natural elements. Granted, this practice is shocking to western sensibilities, but the questions asked by our fellow traveler were just as shocking to our Indian guide.

“Birds can’t eat it all,” he exclaimed. “Then what do they do?”

Our guide sputtered a bit and couldn’t come up with an answer. Then he asked, “How many bodies do they leave up there at a time anyway?”

Given his interest in what I call “gore porn,” there’s a horror movie or two he should have stayed home to watch.

How people handle their dead is intensely personal. It cuts to the heart of what we believe about what manner of beings we are. Most religions teach that humans are dual entities, both physical and spiritual. Dealing with the dissolution of that physical part is always difficult and, at the same time, weirdly fascinating. Think about how many tourist destinations include death—Egyptian pyramids, the Taj Mahal, Westminster Abbey with all its famous eternal residents resting in the walls and under the slabs of the floor. I’m sure you could name more. We’re interested in death and how others handle it since eventually it will come to us all.

Somehow, it always boils down to “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”  

It’s not my place to tell another culture how that transformation should be accomplished.

Then later in the tour, our guide was explaining that girl children used to be considered less desirable, but that was changing. The same fellow who wanted all the gory details of Parsi funeral practices piped up again, asking if abortion was legal in India. With tight lips, our guide told him it was not legal, but she admitted it sometimes happened. She also said couples were not allowed to know the gender of their child before it was born because a girl was more likely to be aborted, which was one reason Indian society was putting an effort into valuing females.

But she was clearly uncomfortable with his question, especially when he said loudly, “So you force women into back alley abortions here. What about birth control? Is that illegal, too?”  

He was clearly spoiling for a political fight over it. Our tour guide went silent for half a minute, and then changed the subject by pointing out another photo-worthy site.

Sex is as big a taboo as death, and just as personal. Ideas about it are deeply held and culturally ingrained. India is a very conservative society. Women don’t talk to strange men about something as personal things as birth control.

I don’t agree with everything I see in the countries we’ve traveled. In fact, I’m appalled by the treatment of women and children in many places, but it’s not my place to confront the tour guide who’s just trying to help us understand how the world works in her part of it.

Understanding is what I’m after. I want to know how people live. I want to listen to what they believe. I hope to have a deeper insight into why they think as they do.

I’ll never achieve that if I’m dragging my own notions into every conversation. I’m here to see, to listen, to ponder. 

Not to pontificate. 

I heard some principles to follow to help me do that, courtesy of a very talented rock violinist from Australia named Katei (rhymes with G’day):     

• Obey the rules of new places I visit.       
• Respect the culture. I don’t have to agree with it or even like it, but I have to respect it. 
• Remember who I am. Learning about the uniqueness of others doesn’t diminish me one jot.  

      

Ketai, a gifted musician. He's classically trained, but blends rock in with more traditional violin pieces. He was a busker (a street musician) in Sydney until the man who would become his agent heard him one day. Now he's playing on various cruise ships almost constantly, and is only home 3-5 days a month, but he's living the dream of making music AND paying taxes!