Things Indians Love

Indians love street food. There is something about street food that Indians cannot resist. Indians can have a gourmet lunch at home and still eagerly wait for the panipuri-walla to arrive. Indians can have dinner at a five star restaurant and yet come out with the itch for a paan from the street vendor. Not a single day goes by in an Indian’s life without some food from the street. No matter where they live, what they do, how much they earn, or how much food they eat at home. And street vendors are too happy to feed the craving: Indian roadsides are filled with assortments of food – in the midst of people and pollution, cars and cows, dust and dung, fume and flies.

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Tags: , Culture, Eating Habits, India, Street Food

Indians love temples. Indians visit temples everyday, have celebration every week, and build a new one every month. For Indians temples are the guardian of this life and the gateway to the next. Temples are the washroom for all earthly sins and trust fund for all future lives. Temples are where Indians glorify god and vilify neighbors; they bring offerings to alleviate sufferings; they come to pray and party; they gather for paid visit and free food.

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Tags: Indian Temples, Place of Worship, Temples

Indians love facial hair. For Indians facial hair is fascination, fashion, and fact of life. Indians consider facial hair to be a fabulous gift, and for some reason or other never want to part with it. You show me an Indian, and I will show you facial hair. From leaders to landlords, from poets to politicians everyone in India has it. Indians are proud of their fertile follicles, and they have every right to be. Indians sweep the facial hair category: longest mustache, longest beard, and even longest ear hair.

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Tags: Beard, Brow, Brow Thearding, Facial Hair, Indian Facination, Longest Beard, Longest Ear Hair, Longest Mustahce, Mustache

Indians love to eat with hand. No spoon, no fork, not utensil at all - just god given five naked fingers and bare palm, and wrist and arm when needed. Tool making forced human to evolve, and Indians successfully resisted the urge when it came to utensils for the dinner table. Indians had time to find out thousands of spices to cook endless curries and build one of the most complicated and elaborate cuisines, but had no time left to come up with something to eat with. Indian culture has cut all connection to cutlery. Even Chinese has chop sticks, but Indians have not figured out beyond their fingers. In India hand to mouth has a completely different meaning.

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Tags: Eating with Hand, Indian Custom, Indian Food

Indians love to burn their brides. For Indians, there is nothing that makes a bride glow brighter. Those who love to burn ants and fire crackers are childish; those who love to burn effigies are angry juveniles; those who love to burn down properties are antisocial pyromaniacs; those who love to burn their brides alive are Indians. No one in the world is macho enough to do that. They have refined the ritual over centuries; this is the epitome of a glorious civilization. So do not try this in your own country, you neophytes.

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Tags: Female Infanticide, Feticide, Honor Killing, Indian Tradition, Infanticide, Sati

Indians love to bare their chest in public. Granted this only applies to men - Indian women are too modest and prefer to bare midriff instead, but that is another post. Indian men expose their chest in styles, three to be precise: traditional, where men are completely bare waist-up except for dazzling accessories dangling around their neck; casual, where men wear only a vest covering some portion of their torso but still leave little to the imagination; and fashionable, where men in shirt keep most, if not all, of the buttons open giving more than ample glimpse of their hairy interior. For Indian men, when it comes to chest, bare is beautiful. When it comes to fashion, bare is the new black.

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Tags: Bare Chest, Habits of Indian Men, Indian Fashion, Indian Men

Indians love wall calendars. Not the desk calendar with funny or inspiring quote of the day, or the spiral bound agenda calendar for keeping business schedules, or the small personal calendars for people with too much free time to plan and write down everything. The billions of walls in India are adorned by calendars with a poorly drawn picture of elephant head Ganesha during midlife crisis - he is alone in the midst of an array of junk food and obviously has not been to the gym for a long time. Yes, those are the ones Indians love. In India it is akin to sacrilege to leave a wall bare without a single calendar, may it be at home, business, school, or workplace. Even in an abandoned empty room with nothing but cobweb hanging from the roof Indians would hang a calendar on the wall in an effort to give it a homely look.

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Tags: , Indian Calendar, Indian Habits, Wall Calendar

Indians love Gandhi, because he is called Mahatma. Indians also love to think him as the father of many things, especially of non-violence. They are ready to fight until death against anyone that questions non-violence. They staunchly follow his teaching of no-cooperation even today. All Indians refuse to cooperate with everyone: professionals with their clients, merchants with their customers, manufactures with their consumers, government officials with citizens. And if anyone insists on getting cooperation, Indians get violent. Non-cooperation trumps non-violence. Violence is the only exception to the principle of non-cooperation: Indians enthusiastically cooperate to promote violence - destroying properties, burning buses, killing people of different religion, inciting communal riots.

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Tags: Bapu, Father of the Nation, Gandhi, Mahatma, People Indians Love

Indians love queues. Despite the diversity, there is nothing that aligns all Indians like a long line. The image of Indians standing in a queue is the national symbol. In India everywhere you go, every situation you encounter, every activity you attend there is a queue waiting for you and plenty of Indians waiting in the queue. Indians are born with the gift of forming queues, and they never miss a single opportunity to do so. Opportunities are abundant in India; queues are ubiquitous. The unique ability of Indian fetuses to form queue inside the womb is the key to population boom. Indians never grow out of it and spend approximately half of their lives waiting in a queue. The other half they spend waiting to join one.

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Tags: Indian Habit, Long Queues, Queue, Standing in Line

Indians love rice. They would eat it at least once a day, if not more. It is almost like an addition: only after a few rice-free meals Indians get restless and crave for rice. When it comes to rice, it is not a just dish for Indians, it is the king of the meal. A mound of rice sits in the middle of the plate surrounded by little side dishes. The side dishes are there to help Indians eat the rice, just to facilitate the process. Indian do not eat with rice, they eat rice with other things.

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Tags: Indian Rice Dishes, Rice, Things Indian Love