Last week, as we rumbled home from Saragur in the ambulance (our personal commuter vehicle!), a white person was spotted in the road. The driver pointed and asked—Is she your friend? We laughed, and denied any relation. Next it was my turn to point and ask—Kannada dalé “white person”? How do you say “white person” in Kannada? To me, a person who has been called “la blanche” and “mzungu” more times that I can count, it was strange to not know my racial identifier in Kannada. Of course the fact that I am white is obvious to people here, but no one has said it to my face in over two weeks.
This has inspired my idea for a new and simple metric of cultural reservedness: number of minutes, hours, days, or weeks for a foreigner to hear and learn her foreigner identifier in the local language. On this scale, Karnataka is most diffident—about a thousand times more-so than Kisumu in Kenya, and a million times more-so than Yaoundé in Cameroon—and I’m still counting! I will let you know when I finally get to the bottom of Karnataka’s reserve.
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