The Indians Abroad

The shopkeeper is extra polite when he does not understand the customer.
The listener is extra polite when she doe not understand you and says, “Could you repeat that please!”

People are just normal polite when they can relate to you. But if you are getting lots of ‘extra polite treatment’, that may mean many things, including some of the things like:

•  they don’t get you
• they don’t understand you
• they don’t relate to you
• they find you different than their own kind
• they don’t know how to interact with you…

Or, in rare cases, they are just extra nice people being extra polite, but you can always tell the difference.

The modern day social disassociation is not a slap in the face, a rude remark, or an outrageous action such as asking you to leave. Instead, it is the actions with extra care, with extra politeness that convey the message.

Most of the times, extra politeness is just extra caution people use when dealing with someone different, someone who does not fit in.

And this includes dealing with cultures or people they don’t understand. It does not necessarily mean that they don’t like you; it just means that they don’t know you enough – your culture, your habits, your values. They don’t include you in their social circle as they don’t understand you well enough. So instead, they treat you with extra caution, with extra politeness.

The extra politeness, as a result, can be an act of exclusion. They don’t know enough about you or your culture to include you. The extra politeness is just like extra formality – too formal to make you feel at home.

You cannot always brand the extra politeness as good or bad. This is a human nature to deal with someone who comes across as an outsider – like someone from a different culture, someone they just don’t get, or someone who is not their own kind.

Even in a multi cultural society of today, the inter-cultural dealings are still very guarded – very cautious. People leave you alone, very politely, as they don’t want to offend you.

Getting polite treatment is good; extra politeness, on the other hand, is not so – most of the time!

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