Indians address older strangers, even shopkeepers, as “Uncle” and “Aunty.” A man up to about fifteen years older is bhai or bhaiya, elder brother. A woman is didi, elder sister. A younger person may be called beta, son.
Tone matters, however. “Aunty” can also sound like a remark about a woman’s age.
Jaan-pehchaan means knowing people and being known by them. A study by Berger, Barnes, Konwar, Singh and colleagues surveyed managers at more than 300 companies in India.
It describes three parts of the practice: pehchaan, recognition, len-den, give and take, and bharosa, trust. Together they shaped how satisfied companies were with their business relationships and how long they planned to keep them.
On February 12, 2014, Narendra Modi, then the BJP’s candidate for prime minister, launched Chai pe Charcha, “discussion over tea,” at a tea stall in Ahmedabad. About 1,500 people gathered there. The video campaign covered 1,000 tea stalls in 300 cities.
Modi called a tea stall “a footpath Parliament.”
Under its Incredible India campaign, the Ministry of Tourism ran Atithi Devo Bhava, “the guest is god.” The words come from the Taittiriya Upanishad.
The actor Aamir Khan was the face of the campaign until 2016. When his role ended, the ministry said that the advertising agency, not the ministry, had hired him.
In the Bhagavata Purana, the poor Brahmin Sudama visits his childhood friend Krishna at Dvaraka. His wife has found a few handfuls of parched and beaten rice for him to bring as a gift. Krishna receives him with great warmth and eats the rice as his favorite food.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made a habit of embracing world leaders. Business Today lists Shinzo Abe, Ashraf Ghani, Mohammed bin Zayed, Emmanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau, Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu and Barack Obama.
Headlines reported that the opposition Congress party mocked the habit as “hugplomacy” in a viral video. In July 2018, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi hugged Modi in Parliament.
In 2018, Google tried to find out why one in three smartphone users in India ran out of storage every day. The answer was “Good Morning” messages, the images that friends and relatives send each other every day. In five years, Google searches for “Good Morning images” had risen tenfold.
Google’s app Files Go, downloaded more than 10 million times, mostly in India, cleared an average of more than 1 GB per user.
In Munna Bhai MBBS (2003), the hero has no medical skill. He wins people over with a jadoo ki jhappi, a “magic hug,” which his mother taught him.
The phrase came from the film. BollyMeaning, a site that explains Bollywood expressions, defines it as a hug the hero gave “to anyone in trouble, to make them feel better.”
At Diwali, according to the gift retailer Ferns N Petals, Indian companies send gifts to “employees, clients, dealers, financers, business associates.” The retailer presents this as a way to keep professional bonds strong.
In a field experiment among pen wholesalers in Chennai, buyers were matched at random with sellers. Buyers matched with a seller from their own ethnic group received a discounted price.
The sellers did not ask these buyers for smaller advance payments, however. The researchers concluded that the discount came from preference for the group, not from greater trust.