If You Are a Foreigner, I Will Tell You All My Shameful Secrets…

Many Westerners I spoke with often asked me if it is really possible for a foreigner to integrate in India. In fact, this interrogation came so many times in the discussions that I thought about writing a post on the topic.

A lot of foreigners’ testimonials describe the Indian society as an open world which is closed at the same time. Open because Indians are known to be very welcoming. Any foreigner who is in India as a tourist or a professional would feel that people are generally trying to help you and most of them are very hospitable. However, the society is also closed because Indian will always consider you as a foreigner who do not share the Indian values and thus cannot access the experience of the typical Indian life such as marrying someone from their family.

My own experience told me something relatively different: for me, the Indian society has always been extremely open. In fact, it depends on the definition of integration we consider and the attitude of the foreigner as well. In terms of being really closed to Indians and having true friends, I believe it is difficult (especially for a male foreign tourist to meet Indian women for example) but possible in case the foreigner really tries to integrate. I met so many Westerners who travelled in India for months or even for years and have not built any single relationship other than superficial contacts with tourist guides, shopkeepers or beggars. These foreigners generally interact with the local people only because they have to; it is part of their travel anyway so they cannot escape it. When these discussions are not bugging them, it becomes a game: interactions are considered as attempts or even opportunities to get the most with the less money. Most of the time, foreigners do think they are really entertaining deep relationships with locals and feel proud of being so well integrated. Some people call it integration in the Indian society, for me it is nothing but superposition of the Western culture on the Indian one. For example, I met during one of my travels in the Himalayas a group of tourists. There were sitting by a river. I joined the group and decided to spend the evening with them. It was very interesting for me: we were all sharing our experience and I came to understand how less they were trying to integrate in the society despite their beliefs of becoming almost like Indians! First they all agreed that fortunately in India there were other foreigners to hang out with so they do not feel too lonely. What a relief! According to them, Indians were there role models in terms of philosophy and spiritual way of living but it is however too difficult to live with such different people. One of these foreigners was Australian. He told us he took a year off after his studies to come to India and experience “the real life, far from the materialistic societies of the West”. He was here to meet “true people”. Nice program… The funny part was that he was convinced that the right thing to do so was by spending months, smoking and attending techno parties with other foreigners in Goa or Manali. I asked him if he was really happy wasting almost one year of his life doing nothing. He gave me a surprised stare as if I was coming from another planet and told me: “Come on! This is India man!” Dude, if this definition of India is yours, it is certainly not mine!

Real Integration means trying to speak the local language, meeting different kind of people and building strong relationships. I believe that living in India, working there and trying to mix with Indians as much as possible really helps to build these relationships. One just needs to be as curious as possible about India as such deep understanding permits to build bridges across cultures as I explained in a previous post (read the article called “Understand Diversity”, posted on 24/06/2009 for more details). Thus, I met many of my friends in India when I was living in Chennai. I really consider them as my closest pals and will always cherish the moments we spent together the same way they will. It is true that they will always consider me as a foreigner, but this status always permits me to access information that they are not even sharing between them. In that sense, I found the Indian society extremely open to me. For example, I came to know that some of my Indian colleagues I was working with were divorced but absolutely nobody else within the company except me was aware of that. In India divorces are still not accepted in the society so the people who are living this situation generally prefer to hide it rather than having to face judgmental comments from the people around them. Of course, hiding such big thing every day is difficult so they feel released to share their personal life with an outsider. I do not know other societies in the world as much as the Indian one but I believe that the most conservative the society is, the easiest it is for a foreigner to access secret information and deep hided secrets within the same providing he succeeded to mix effectively with locals.

In conclusion, having lived in the Subcontinent for quite some time, I was often wondering if I was integrated or not. Now, I understood that the real question to ask myself would rather be: “in which way can I consider myself part of the Indian society?”

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