10 Things About India
Things to know when travelling in India:
1. In India, a hotel isn’t necessarily a place that has rooms for overnight rental. The word hotel is also used synonymously with the word restaurant.
2. Chat has two meanings. Chaat (proper spelling, pronounced ch-aught) generally means snack food. To chat is what you do with a friend over instant messaging or the phone.
3. A “call taxi” is just a taxi that you call to schedule pickup.
4. Using your left hand to give someone something or eating with it can be considered slightly faux pas in some areas.
5. An Indian that shakes his/her head in a side-to-side motion with their neck as a pivot is really expressing an affirmative even though it could appear as if their expressing negation.
6. When accepting business cards, it’s courteous to receive the card and read it rather than immediately filing it in your front pocket. Consider this in other parts of East Asia as well.
7. A “love marriage” describes people who fall in love and get married.
8. An email ID is the same thing as an email address. In the West, we typically don’t pluralize email by adding an ’s’ although it’s not incorrect — in India, it seems to be the norm.
9. Vegetarians abound in India. It’s paradise for a person (like me) who seems to have a laundry list of questions to ask of waitstaff before ordering. When they say vegetarian in this country — they’re serious. Packaged food items are duly indicated as being vegetarian using a green dot. Foods containing “non-veg” related items use a red dot.
10. A red dot on a woman’s forehead has nothing to do with meat products (as noted in point 9 above). It typically signifies that she is a married, Hindu woman who’s husband is still alive. Young, unmarried, girls will also wear the chukkha or bindi. The position of the bindi is significant as a center of energy, according to schools of Hindu thought. The bindi itself can be comprised of either a pinch of red holy powder or what amounts to a sticker.