Light-Say-Burr

Recently, a distant relative I barely know visited my home in Gurgaon. He is probably in his early 60s. He finished his dinner, got up and went to the sink to wash his hands. Why couldn’t he take the plate with him? I was thinking, who exactly are you expecting to pick up your plate? You’re not even in your own house. Of course, I didn’t say anything. He was a guest and older than me. The disturbing part isn’t even that he left his plate on the table. I genuinely don’t think it registered in his mind that he had left anything behind. In his mind, dinner was over. The plate? Someone else would pick it up. That’s how Indian men are trained. First your mother picks up after you, then your sister and then your wife. Travel outside India and you realise how absurd this is. We talk endlessly about preserving Indian culture. But we rarely ask which parts of that culture actually deserve to be preserved. If ‘culture’ means a grown man can’t even pick up his own dirty plate because his mother, sister or wife will do it, maybe that part of our culture deserves to die. Not everything old deserves to be preserved.