What is Culture?

By Maj Gen Pushpendra Singh

Definitely worth a read -- and a wake-up call, if ever there was one needed!!

A visit to Thailand takes the Indian aback because the civilisation is so advanced. We're used to landing in cities and discovering that they are more modern than ours, and have superior infrastructure. Indeed, it's not easy for the Indian to name a nation whose cities are in as much disarray as his. This difference is fine when we go to Europe or America, because we see white people in a different way, and expect them to be better than us. But a coloured race showing its superiority is troubling. And the slap in Thailand comes not from infrastructure or modern cities, but from culture.

Thais behave as Europeans do. Let us look at how.

Traffic is disciplined, and always in formation. Cars and rickshaws stay in their lane. This is not because they are policed (I have visited Thailand a few times and cannot say what a traffic policeman looks like), but because that is the culture.

Bangkok, with two million (20 lakh) cars, has evening jams as bad as those in Bombay. But these are silent jams, and this is the second thing we observe in Thailand: people do not honk. Cars remain in their place, moving forward when their turn comes. There are no signs that instruct them not to: they just don't honk. But why not? Because there is trust that the driver in front and to the side is going to act correctly -- and inevitably they do. Cars do not cut across each other or scramble for position or occupy space merely because otherwise someone else might. In India the trust is missing and, that is why, so is the discipline.

The third difference is the approach to work. Thais do things themselves, as people do in the west. But there is also, unlike India, a culture of equality of work. In the northern town of Chiang Mai, a French literature graduate from university told me he was saving up the 270,000 baht (about Rs 3.4 lakh) to buy an auto-rickshaw, what Thais call a tuk-tuk. How many of our graduates would want to be known as a rickshaw driver? This was not a romantic thought. It would give him an income that would be close to what he would make in a white collar job, unthinkable in India.

I have seen some middle-class Thais supplement their income by putting up stalls in weekend markets, many arriving at the place in their cars. This points to a comfort with one's status in life that is not there in our culture.

The fourth difference is cleanliness. Thais are one of the cleanest races in the world. It goes without saying that Buddhist countries are far more cleaner and have a better sense of hygiene than the Asian Sub-continent.  Both Hindus and Muslims, the two leading religious groups in India do not have a very appreciative sense of hygiene with the sole exception of Kerala which is probably the only state in India known for its cleanliness, both personal and public, probably because the Christians in Kerala who form over 25% of the population have managed to inculcate a better sense of hygiene to their Hindu and Muslim fellow citizens who by themselves are far better than their counterparts in other states of India. 

Countries are clean in Europe also, but they don't have a street culture like Thailand does. Bangkok lives outdoors and life spills out onto the street at all times of the day. Few families cook at home, and so most meals -- breakfast, lunch and dinner -- are had in stalls on the streets.

Despite this, roads are always clean. I have not seen civic workers on my visits, though certainly there are. The streets are clean because Thais clean up their own mess. Food stalls on the road have no rubbish strewed about them. There is also hygiene: the vendor of fruit on the street cuts and serves it without ever touching it with his hands. Before dawn, passing a closing food stall in one of Bangkok's roughest neighbourhoods, I saw its owner scrub it clean before he left.

Most toilets anywhere in the country, city, town, village, airport, restaurant, will not just be clean, they will be polished and fragrant. Why? One reason is personal hygiene, which all Indians think they have. The second is ownership. The culture is not me-versus-the-world, as it is in India where, outside our homes, we leave a place dirty because someone else will clean it up and we are not coming back to it.

Across Thailand, in its cities, on its islands, in the small villages of its different tribes -- Hmong, Lisu, Lahu -- this cleanliness is constant. It does not change in the areas of the poor, who are few, or the peasant. In a town market, which was swept clean and shut by the time I got there at night, shops had left their goods outside, in the open without fear of theft.

The fifth thing we notice is respect for the individual and for personal space. And this one is what separates truly civilised cultures from tribal ones: the ability to see the human being as an individual, irrespective of the way he looks. And the knowledge that the individual's space must not be intruded upon physically or mentally without apology.

To see it so entrenched in Thailand is puzzling because Thailand was never colonised and Thais have no access to European culture, because they cannot speak English or any other European language. It means that their civic behaviour is not the result of a process of modernisation, as it would be in India, but inherent to the culture. This is a most difficult thing for the Indian to swallow, because we are convinced of the greatness of our heritage. Worryingly, for us that is, Thais haven't needed a period of colonisation to absorb and emulate what constitutes modern civic behaviour.

Thais will wait a few steps away from someone talking to another person, and approach only when the other is disengaged. This ability to see people as individuals means that there is politeness of a sort that takes the Indian aback. On a visit a few years ago, a woman whose village shop I was in was approached by a beggar, who was tattered and bleeding. She did not give him any money, but spoke to him with the same politeness and respect that she showed me.

At a factory manufacturing silk in northern Thailand once, I heard the raised voice of an irritated customer in the showroom asking the saleswoman not to play games over the discounts available. It was a woman in an Indian group, of course, and I fled -- in embarrassment at the woman's behaviour but also in shame because I knew that it could just as easily have been me: that is how we behave with sellers.

No Thai behaves like that. It means that there is something within Thai culture that makes them civilised, but what? Could it be Buddhism, the dominant feature of Thai culture? If it is, then the message Thais absorbed from that religion is very different from the one absorbed in India, the source of Buddhism.

But it is unlikely to be religion, because Thais acknowledge their 'bad' Buddhist practice of being non-vegetarian. No Thai except the most dedicated monk is vegetarian. Thais have a culture that is borrowed from India (their epic is the Ramayan) but is different in some ways. Thai temple dance is sensual, as dance should be. I find the slow swaying of their hips by Thai girls, accompanied by precise gestures of hand and head, hypnotic and riveting. Thai culture is spectacularly aesthetic, and, unlike India's, fully engaged with nature. Flower pots have clear water, aquatic plants and little fish. The fish, I realised, also ate up mosquito larvae.

Architecture is first rate, whether the house owner is rich, middle-class or peasant. In Bombay you could spend a million dollars (Rs 4.5 crore) buying an apartment and the building would look like rubbish. Thailand's infrastructure is 30 or 40 years ahead of India's and, if anything, I find the gap increasing each visit. Mind you, Thailand is not even among the four Asian economies which are called tigers: Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea. And, with over 60 million people, Thailand is not a city-state, but even so, Thailand's per capita income is four times higher than India's, and its income distribution is superior.

India has a great religious heritage and one of the world's finest artistic cultures, deep and wide, from Indo-Persian to Carnatic, and we are justly proud of it. But an unemotional observation of our civilisation will reveal how it is also different, and wanting. We could tell ourselves, as Naipaul has, that we had something superior once which was disturbed by foreign invasion. But the evidence for that is thin. The parts of India that have not been touched by colonisation are actually primitive. And there is nothing noble or civilised in the way that these communities live: the life of people in these villages is as short and as brutal as those of animals.

The best of India, intellectually, culturally and civilisationally is in its towns and cities, not its villages. And when we compare our cities and our civic behaviour with those of the world we are humbled by our mediocrity.