In India a side-to-side movement of the head often answers a question. Wikipedia’s article on the head bobble says that “most frequently it means yes, or is used to indicate understanding.” It can also take the place of a thank-you.
The meaning depends on context. “An unenthusiastic head bobble can be a polite way of declining something without saying no directly.”
In one of the Akbar and Birbal tales, the emperor Akbar praises the brinjal, and his minister Birbal praises it too. Birbal even sings two songs about it. A few days later Akbar finds a brinjal dish tasteless. Birbal now says that the vegetable is unhealthy.
Asked why he changed his mind, Birbal says that he is loyal to the emperor, not to the brinjal. One retelling puts it this way: “I am beholden to you, not to the Brinjal.”
In 2008 the British magazine Information Age asked why Indian outsourcing staff seemed to agree so readily. Girish Vadya, head of the leadership training institute at Infosys, was quoted: “The way an Indian will say no is to say Yes, but…”
The article added: “They find it very difficult to say no directly.” It called this a deeply engrained part of the culture. Some Indian providers had begun to train their staff to be more assertive.
In 2007 the Wall Street Journal ran an article on how to tell when yes really means no. Anant Sundaram of the Tuck School of Business said: “Indians hate to say no.” Soumen Basu, executive chairman of Manpower India, said: “The Indian psyche is very submissive.”
Vijay Mahajan of the University of Texas at Austin saw another cause. Where jobs are scarce, he argued, a refusal can seem to end the deal. The habit comes from that more than from the country itself.
In his book The Power of Saying No, the author Ashutosh Garg writes that in India subordinates “may find it particularly difficult to say no to superiors.” In collectivist cultures, he adds, “saying no directly is often avoided to preserve harmony and maintain relationships.”
Instead of refusing, he writes, an Indian may say sochte hain, “we will think about it.” Governance Now published an excerpt in February 2026.
On February 2, 2021, a member of Parliament asked about revising the income limit for the “creamy layer” among the Other Backward Classes. The Minister of State for Social Justice and Empowerment replied in the Lok Sabha.
The “proposal for revision of creamy layer limit for OBCs is under consideration of the Government,” he said. The answer gave no date and no decision.
In a column in The Tribune, Lakhinder Jit Singh Vohra wrote: “Instead of saying no, we are taught to nod our head and take it.”
In India, he wrote, “everything is a yes, even when everything is meant to be a no.” A refusal arrives as an assurance, such as “200 per cent it will be taken care of.”
Haan mein haan milana, to match one’s yes to another’s yes, means to agree with whatever someone says. The Rekhta dictionary defines it as agreeing without understanding and accepting another’s view without question.
“We don’t know how to say No.” This is the first of ten tips for doing business with Indians from ValueNotes, an Indian research firm.
The reason, it says, is upbringing: “We’re taught from an early age not to contradict our elders.” The result is promises that cannot be delivered and deadlines that cannot be met.
In February 2026 the Delhi High Court refused bail to a man accused of breaking a promise of marriage. After a relationship, he allegedly refused to marry the woman because their horoscopes, or kundalis, did not match.
Justice Swarana Kanta Sharma held that “the subsequent refusal to marry on the ground of non-matching kundalis” raised doubts, at first sight, about whether the promise had been genuine.