Jing hates to eat with hands and always ask for spoon and folk. Even in Sir and Madams house she was avoiding this way of eating.

It doesn’t really look nice though. Squeezing and mixing rice and dal together on a plate gives the impression of a child playing with mud. I only ate bread with hands and never tried the ‘rice performance’. For me the idea of eating gravy that run below my fingernails is not appetizing at all.

In a restaurant in Siliguri I learned that there is a nice way of eating with hands and a very awful way too. On my neighbor table to the right was a young man eating in company with 2 women. Peacefully together were 3 different performances of how to take food.

1) The use of tools like spoon and folk
2) A clean and nice way of eating with hands.
3) The ugliest way of eating with hands that made me feel like vomiting.

Instead of eating nicely with 3 fingers of your right hand the young man was muddying on his plate like a pig. His whole hand up to his angle was covered with gravy and rice partially dried. Whenever he mixed his food it looked like he is a toddler who just started to eat on his own. Sauce running down his arm, food dropping on the top of the table or down on the floor. In every brake he was shaking his hand over his plate to ‘clean’ it. Yack!

So not all Indians can really eat with their hand. Good to know.

Alex