Authentic Experiences

My neighbourhood has a significant population of western people. There are a lot of big cars with blue "CD" and "UN" plates parked in front of the swankiest looking houses in the area. Whenever I go to my market for daily groceries, I'm bound to see at least one white face over there, either walking around with a determined swagger of perfect ethnic adaptation or looking lost and awkward like a kid separated from his parents in an amusement park.

Every now and then I bump into them in one of the stores on the main strip. It usually ends up being a very awkward encounter. It happens more often than not around here when two white people meet in a setting other than an expat party. They eye each other askance and try to ignore the other gora in the room as if they were the only white person in Delhi. The other white person scans the shelves and tries to chat the errand boys in broken Hindi, because he's the one who's blending in, whoever this other white impostor is, must be a spoiled "UN" or "Embassy" type who had to come down to the cornershop only because the organic home delivery was not available today. The other one is the one must be the one who's living the "authentic Indian" lifestyle. Meanwhile, the Indian shopkeeper watches the show with puzzlement. He might sincerely expect a friendly exchange between the westerners of "where are you from" and "what are you doing in India", but no, they quickly pick up their groceries, pay, and leave the shop in hurried manner, leaving the small change on the counter.

There is strange psychology about this behaviour, which seems to be a mix of a subtly colonial attitude mixed with romanticed expectations of the "ethnic" and "authentic" experieces that they are going to have with the "locals" in the foreign country. Then they can go back and their ordeal in harsh conditions can be added to their CV of "unique experiences" that the person has had. The satirical "Stuff Expat Aid Workers Like" - blog quite fantastically summarizes this phenomenon (the comments are worth reading too). The anecdote is set in Central America, but could might as well be in India. A white person bumps into another in a small local café:

So it’s no wonder that she’ll look away or stare straight through that American dude that shows up at the little market at the same time. ”Oh, your husband?” the corn lady might say. “No no,” the EAW will struggle to explain aloud, “I don’t know him. I’ve never seen him. I don’t know what he might be doing here….” We have nothing to do with one another, nothing at all in common…she will continue in her head… I’m a long-timer. I’ve got field cred. He’s probably a short-term volunteer or a tourist or a consultant, here for a short trip. He probably knows none of your customs. I bet you don’t wave at him when he goes by. He’s likely one of those typical Expat Aid Workers types, tromping around, clueless, feeling uncomfortable and superior to the locals. I’d bet he doesn’t even speak the language or really know any local people except for his driver. I’m the one who’s locally integrated. I’m the one who belongs here, not him!

Humph. These other foreigners, trespassing on the EAW’s own individual and patented experience of adventure and local living. Who do they think they are? Why do the locals assume all white people know each other, or might want to greet one another with smiles and handshakes, treat each other to a portion of roasted corn and explain where they are from and what they are doing there at the roadside market? Really. These locals don’t understand EAWs at all.

Some of this hard-wired antisocial behaviour might be explained by the fact that the aid-worker/UN/NGO racket is a very competitive game of whoever speaks the most languages, feels more comfortable in various settings and has established their field cred by living in "harsh" conditions, i.e. the way local people in that country normally live in.


I was in an afterparty invited by my friends who I had met in the bar the same night and everybody was enjoying themselves with some drinks on a rooftop on a hot Delhi night. The bubbling discussion diverted into work and somebody casually asked me what I was doing. When I told them that I work in the embassy it was as if the you could've heard the sound of the needle skipping on a record, they looked at me with mixed faces of contempt and ridicule, "oh so you're one of those people, Embassy heads, huh?". They never bothered to explain what they meant by this, but instead continued on lecturing how this little NGO where they were doing a 3-month unpaid internship, was the most important humanitarian endeavour in the history of development work. A spoiled "Embassy head" would never understand such things, though.


Another explanation why western people can be very awkward with their kind abroad has to do with the whole industry of "authentic experiences", a form of tourism really, which is a result of a kind of a post-consumerist culture, where many young western find themselves in these days. Buying things from a store has lost its novelty value and is more like a necessity, even going to a package holiday with the family is comparable to eating at McDonald's, it's almost embarrassing in it's mundanity - therefore one must do something that nobody else has done, something unique, like going to the most obscure place they can find in the map, hell-bent on understanding the local culture, living with the people, to have a true ethnic experience! So they quit their job and take a gap year:

But much to their consternation, after smoking hash with the sadhus while riding a rabid camel in Rajasthan and hangliding with the buddhist monks in Bhutan while doing cocaine or getting accidentally married to the village chief's daughter in Laos drunk on the local spirits or whatever other compromising situation they get themselves in, they realize that no matter how hard they've tried, someone else has been there already, or worse yet, is ruining their authentic ethnic experience by being there right now. There's a loud group of Israelis on post-military service holiday, a German couple of rat-race dropouts in their early forties and a bunch of 21-year old French girls who just finished their NGO-internship and are now backpacking before going home and they are all waiting for their turn for the unique ethnic experience.