As the author of Culture Wise India: The Essential Guide to Culture, Customs & Business Etiquette what are the most important cultural considerations for Westerners visiting India?  What are the most common cultural misunderstandings between Indians and Westerners?

Most Indians use the word ‘foreigner’ to refer to the white man from the Western world and includes people from the whole of Europe, North America and Australia. Having been colonized by the Dutch, French, Portuguese and the British, one would expect a good measure of hostility towards Westerners but there isn’t just a surprising absence of malice – on the contrary, Indians are xenophiles!

On spotting foreigners in public places, an Indian will be the first to strike up a conversation and offer help, even inviting the visitor to his home. Indians are more adept at bridging the cultural gap between Westerners and themselves than the other way around.

Some cultural differences:

1. Indians aren’t individualistic. Privacy isn’t important. They do things by consulting elders, relatives and friends. It’s a family-oriented and patriarchal society, placing great respect on age, tradition and religion.
2. Indians usually refrain from saying a straight and simple, ‘No’ in response to a request for a commodity or service.
3. Actions are justified with reference to the context, resulting in double standards not only in the family, community and society but also in business organizations and state machineries, including law enforcement agencies, which though infused with high-minded laws (drawn from British models), have the poorest implementation.
4. Indians have a penchant for ranks and designations. In a highly materialistic society, where status is measured in terms of money, rank is the only substitute for money.
5. Indians invest a good amount of time in building relationships, whether personal or business. Unlike in the West, it’s ‘pleasure before business,’ because it’s important for them to know what type of a person they’re dealing with.
6. Negotiation, at least in the initial stages, seldom is one-to-one. You will be negotiating with a group of Indians who will use the term, “we” rather than “I” while making a point. Indians hate being criticised, patronized or rushed. Don’t expect a decision to be reached at a meeting, as Indians tend to consult with the higher ups before making a commitment.
7. Sexual attitudes are so orthodox in the land of the Kama Sutra to the point of being prudish. There’s strict monitoring of content in the media – print, cinema and television. Demonstration of affection in public, even to one’s own spouse, can get you in trouble. Even a peck on the cheek got American Richard Gere a court summons!
8. Scantily clad Western women are perceived as having loose morals and as a sex object. This perception is made stronger by the dominant role played by the Western woman in the bedroom in Hollywood movies and the pornographic videos that have swamped the country. As such, foreign women in India may often find themselves the victims of ‘eve teasing,’ – harassment, lewd remarks, insolent stares and molestation in public places.
9. Very often, young foreigners in India, go about without personal grooming and in soiled clothes, possibly to demonstrate solidarity with the poor of India. But such people are dismissed as the ‘hippy crowd.’
10. Indians take religion very seriously and their sentiments can be easily hurt, often resulting in an outcry if not the occasional riot which is more often than not, attributed to what is termed as ‘politicization of religion’ – for extracting maximum political mileage. But communal violence isn’t confined to Hindus and Muslims alone. Although known for its religious tolerance, recent years have witnessed religious persecution of Christians in some parts of the country with intermittent reports of violence reported in the national newspapers, one of the most heinous being the murders of the Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two young sons, who were burnt alive in their jeep in 1999.

One of the most obvious cultural differences between countries is language.  While the West hears so much about English-speaking India and its call centers, estimates of the percentage of Indians who speak English vary greatly: between about 5% and 30%.  What do you think is realistic for visitors to India to expect in terms of the English proficiency of their Indian hosts?

In terms of number of English speakers, India ranks third in the world after the US and the UK. However, the percentages vary from region to region: while most of the people in the northern states of India speak Hindi, most of the people in the southern states don’t even understand the language and rely on English to communicate with their countrymen in the north. Again, the percentage of English speakers is higher in metro cities and practically zero in rural areas. Even in cities, it is the middle class that speaks English as higher education in India is imparted in English. Therefore corporate communication in most companies is in English, giving India a great competitive edge over other countries in the region and China in particular.

Indian English has a unique identity, distinct from British English, American English and International English – it exists in a variety of styles, flavours, accents and cadences influenced by local languages, the most popular being ‘Hinglish,’ a combination of Hindi and English. Besides this, Indian English is spoken with a number of accents, which are borrowed from the regional language and therefore vary from region to region. It’s generally accepted that the easiest accent to understand the language is around Mumbai.

Written English is of the archaic and literary forms – formal, ornate, flowery, and excessively polite. Terms such as ‘Respected Sir,’ ‘I beg to submit,’ and ‘kindly do the needful’ are used in everyday correspondence.

Your company does business with Westerners and is setting up a factory in the United States.  Companies are increasingly in a similar boat, doing business with India and consequently the country is growing as a destination for business travelers.  How well do you think Indian companies are adapting to having international partners and what are the roadblocks to an effective Western-Indian business partnership?

Despite the big cultural divide, business culture by itself is a compromise between traditional Indian business culture and its Western counterpart with a tendency towards the latter due to Western management education (home-grown and acquired from prestigious institutes in the West), the English language being the conduit and cementing force.

However, Indians perceive themselves as victims of racism due to their colonial past. The Arcelor-Mittal merger episode in 2006 lent further credibility to this perception and more recently, the Tata bid to buy Jaguar.

On the other hand, corruption is an unpleasant fact in India. Businessmen regularly pay huge sums of money to politicians and bureaucrats for expediting or endorsing their files. Transparency International’s Global Corruption Report 2007  alleged that bribes amounting to Rs: 26.3b are paid every year to court officials, particularly in the lower tiers of the judiciary. In a 2007 survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers, 38 per cent of over 5,400 companies’ representatives said they had to pay bribes to obtain licences or get orders. It’s impossible to live and work in India and not come across an aspect of the black economy, or not be part of it even if unwittingly.

The ‘Bandh,’ which means ‘closed’ in Hindi and is a form of protest used by political activists during which, an entire group declares a general strike, usually lasting one day, results in huge losses of resources. Sometimes, whole cities close down, e.g., ‘Mumbai bandh.’ Has anyone ever heard of a ‘New York bandh’?

As a resident of the former Portuguese colony of Goa, Daman and Diu, how does Portuguese-influenced India differ culturally from the rest of the country?

Indians of other parts of the country perceive the culture of this former Portuguese colony as being Western – clothing, language (70,000 people speak Portuguese), music, diet, socializing, dance forms, festivals, table etiquette, architecture, religion, place of women in society and most importantly, many things that are taboo elsewhere in India are not so in Goa! Though the English colonized the rest of India, they did not integrate with the natives, as did the Portuguese. This is the main reason that while the culture of Goa, Daman and Diu got ‘Westernized,’ under the Portuguese rule, the culture of the rest of India did not change during the British rule.

If one were to visit the former Portuguese enclaves of Goa, Daman and Diu for a week, what would you suggest as a native to best give someone a sense of true Indo-Portuguese culture?