Indians don't know how to have fun

I believe these very words came out of my own mouth yesterday. I misspoke. Indians do know how to have fun, but it's so rare that they can really enjoy life the way we in the west do.

My friend with whom I was enjoying saarang remarked that "the canons of happiness are totally different." He's right. Indians have to work hard just to survive. The living here is not easy. When you have over a billion people and more than half are illiterate and everyone is competing for jobs and placement in school and status things get a little tense. As it is, Indians have this mentality of either working hard all the time, or being lazy all the time. I see a lot of poor people split between these two camps. Some are constantly working. All day they are sweeping the street, washing their clothes and their children's clothes, preparing food, going to barter for food, never stopping, but not getting very far in life, just surviving and barely taking care of a family. I see others who do nothing. They just sit around all day in the shade, waiting for some passerby to give them some rupees so they can eat something. They don't bathe, they don't seem to care, I can't tell whether they care or not, they just seem not to.

But one thing that remains somewhat level is the idea that fun is more of a luxury here than a necessity. "Fun" as far as I can tell is going to the cinema. Now, don't misunderstand this. Many people enjoying going to watch movies at the theater as a form of entertainment, but that's not all. For example, attending sporting events in the west is a big deal. Think about European football leagues... Think about American football and basketball leagues. When I was watching glimpses of the Chennai open (the tennis tournament that is in the first week of january) all those in attendance were europeans (or americans or south americans). I saw very few indians. I don't know who actually attends cricket matches. My guess is only wealthy people.

Wandering around yesterday at IIT Madras and seeing all the college kids acting like american college kids was fun for me, but I noticed some very peculiar things. All the shows and concerts inspired total madness. It was like these things don't happen very often. Then it hit me. All these people are india's privileged. They have the money to attend these things and enjoy them. However, they either haven't seen them very often and act insane when they do because of it, or know that this sort of event is a complete rarity and really want to squeeze every drop of entertainment out of it, because in Chennai, we're about to have a long cultural drought of about 9 months (winter is the only season in which this amount of activity happens).

Other things that count as entertainment here are playing cricket, and watching cricket. Now, I'm an advocate of cricket. In fact I think USA should get their damna ct together and bring back our cricketing heritage! However, cricket is a boring game. It's ALMOST as boring as baseball, not quite, because baseball is the most boring game ever invented. Even more to the point, baseball is not America's national sport, it's America's national PASSTIME! We're totally honest about it too. We watch baseball to PASS THE TIME, not for active entertainment. So it is with cricket. The problem is, cricket is the only game in town. And it's amazingly boring.

Considering everything I've seen and done, I think the main point is that India has much more difficult living conditions, and people really just have to get by. The only ones who can "have fun" and cut loose are the privileged ones. Moreover, most of them go to the west...