Unit 10 Lifestyle Lesson 1 “Manners Around the World”

China

Dining

Sit where you are instructed to sit. Be graceful and polite when taking food with chopsticks. Don’t make much noise when eating or drinking soup. Don’t play with chopsticks or point at anyone with them. For a formal dinner wear formal dress.

Gift

Do present and receive things with both hands. Politely refusing a gift before accepting it is the norm in Chinese culture, so don’t be discouraged when someone initially refuses your gift. White flowers are not good as gifts as they symbolize death.

Greetings

Shake hands softly as a firm handshake could be considered a sign of aggression. It may make your Chinese friends feel uncomfortable. Greet the most senior first and gradually.

South Africa

Dining

Arrive on time. Wear casual clothes. Offer help to the hostess with the preparation of the meal and clearing up after the meal is over. The guest is served first, then gradually the oldest male, rest of the men, children, and finally women. Do not begin to eat or drink anything until the oldest man at the table has begun. South African people usually do not use left hand in taking meals.

Gift

In general, South Africans give gifts on birthdays and Christmas. It is common for several friends to share the cost of a gift. If you are invited to a South African’s home, bring flowers and good quality chocolates to the host family.

Greetings

When dealing with foreigners, most South Africans shake hands with a smile while maintaining eye-contact. Some women do not shake hands and merely nod their head, so it is best to wait for a woman to extend her hand. Men may kiss a woman they know well on the cheek in place of a handshake. Greetings are leisurely and are marked by good cheers.

Great Britain

Dining

If you are invited to a dinner wait until your host(ess) indicates you to begin eating. You may use a piece of bread on a fork to soak up sauce or gravy. Never hold the bread in your fingers to do this. You may eat chicken and pizza with your fingers if you are at a barbecue, or in a very informal setting. Otherwise always use a knife and fork.

Gift

It is customary to take a small gift for the host if invited to a home. This is usually flowers or chocolates. Some people may send flowers in advance of a dinner party but it is equally acceptable to take them on the day. Gifts are opened on receipt.

Greetings

A handshake is the most common form of greeting among the British people and is customary when you are introduced to somebody new. It is only when you meet a friend of the opposite sex whom you haven’t seen for a long time, that you would give a kiss on the cheek.

Middle East

Dining

Use your right hand when picking up and eating food; never your left hand, which you keep at your side. Do not place your left hand on the table, and do not use it to pass food. People use spoons, forks and knives, if necessary, and hardly any utensils.

Gift

Gifts are given frequently to show love, gratitude and respect. Anytime you are invited to someone’s place, bring a gift. The most common gifts are food items such as pastries, chocolates, sweets and cookies. Dates are also commonly given as gifts. People also value food and arts and crafts items from other cultures.

Greetings

The most common greeting is salaam alaykum ('May peace be upon you'), to which the reply is waalaykum as salaam ('and peace be upon you too'). Shaking hands (between men) is an important gesture of mutual respect. Hugging and kissing on the cheeks between same sex people in social situations are quite common though it is strictly forbidden between men and women.

Unit 10 Lifestyle Lesson 2 “Etiquette and Netiquette”

Once upon a time, there was a strange man who was highly bothered to see others' happiness. His own personal interest was at any cost important to him. Neither was he a polite man, nor did he like other people to be polite to each other. In fact, he hated the courteous and polite people around him and thus he hated a few expressions like ‘please’, ‘thank you’, ‘don't mention it’ etc. It troubled him a lot when people around were smiling to use these expressions.

The man considered all these expressions extravagant. So, he took a mission to invent a device that would steal these polite words. He calculated two benefits from his efforts. One, people won’t use these words and thus he would be relieved of his apathy to people‘s polite behavior and the second one was earning money by selling the words stolen by the machine to somebody else. He took great caution so that nobody would understand his secret plan. After a few months’ hard work, he succeeded in inventing the machine he desired for a long long time.

The machine started working and it gave the man complete satisfaction. People from their long practice would try to say- ‘thank you’, ‘so kind of you’, ‘my pleasure’, ‘don't mention it’ etc. as to appreciate others or express gratitude. But their tongue could not produce these words. The machine caught them. It resulted in a huge change in people's behavior and attitudes. Gradually, people became rough and tough, they lost their mental cool, they were blaming each other or fighting with each other. They became so selfish that they started refusing to help others without having a return for their service. Love, respect, affections, fellow feelings became some unknown words and eventually, they were missing from people's practices.

The man was terribly happy with his success, but he didn't count on two little girls of special needs. They had speech difficulty and so they used to communicate using sign language. Since the machine couldn’t steal gestures, these girls continued their previous practices of being kind and polite. Soon, they realised the difference between them and other people which led them to investigate the reason. After much toil, they could discover the wicked man who was in a hide out on the top of a hill next to the sea with his enormous machine busy in capturing people’s polite words and separating them into letters. The girls found the man taking a nap when they crept up to the machine and rewind it so that people could get back to their normal behaviour.

As a result, the machine exploded, scattering all the letters it had gathered into the sky. After some moments, the letters started coming down, like rain, and ended up in the sea. After that, everyone became polite and respectful to each other again. The anger and the arguments stopped, proving that good manners are very useful for keeping people together in a spirit of happiness.

Unit 10 Lifestyle Lesson 3 “Food and Culture”

Syed Mujtaba Ali was an acclaimed Bengali author, academic and linguist. He was a travel enthusiast, and his travelogues are regarded as precious gems in our Bangla literature. At some point of time between the two World Wars, Syed Mujtaba Ali set out on a ship from India on a journey to Europe. Leaving Sri Lanka behind, he sailed across the Arabian Sea, then along the coast of Africa, before reaching the Suez Port. Syed Mujtaba Ali’s time in Egypt was punctuated by a number of funny anecdotes, both about the people and the pyramids. The following excerpt is from Syed Mujtaba Ali’s travelogue, Tales of a Voyager (Jolay Dangay) where he gives a charming and insightful description of Egyptian food and language. Nazes Afroz translated the following excerpt.

Our Bengali meals consist of five flavours of food—bitter, savoury, hot, sour sides and desserts. The English eat only sweet and savoury preparations. They cannot stomach the hot stuff, and even less the sour. And possibly never even knew that bitters could be consumed. Hence English cuisine seems bland and tasteless to us. But the English can bake good cake-pastry-pudding, something they learned from the Italians. In my opinion, our sandesh and rasogolla are such delicacies that there is no reason to go bananas over those desserts.

Egyptian cuisine is a close cousin of Indian food of the Mughlai variety. I might not be able to prove the theory but after tasting food in many countries, it is my firm belief that imitating the Taj Mahal of cooking, that the Mughals perfected after coming to India (one should not forget that they could not master it in their own land as the Indian spices were unavailable in their motherland of Turkestan), the people in Afghanistan, Iran, the Arab land, Egypt, even Spain, have been trying to build their own little Taj of cuisine. The reach of this gastronomy has spread to East Europe’s Greece, Hungary, Rumania, Yugoslavia, Albania and even Italy.

I discovered all these theories many years later. At present Abul Asfia and Claudette Chenier brought back samples of various dishes on a platter. I saw there was murg musallam, sheesh kebab and five or six kinds of unknown items. The known ones did not really carry the aroma of Kolkata food but it mattered little. After eating Irish stew and Italian macaroni on the ship, our palates had lost all taste; so seeing these dishes made our mouths water. My heart was craving for a little boiled rice, fried bitter gourd, sonamoog daal or yellow lentil, fried potol [pointed gourd] and fish curry—why was I daydreaming? Just rice and fish curry could do, but these were not available outside Bengal. So what was the point of such mourning?

So I showed them the items from the platter I did not want.

Peeking at the next table, I saw one man was about to start eating two cucumbers on a plate. How could two cucumbers, whatever the size might be, be enough for someone’s dinner? I could not solve that puzzle by wracking my brain. That too, he was sitting at a table in an eatery supplemented by sauces and chutneys. Even in a sophisticated country like England, people would bite into an apple right after buying it off the street. They did not have to enter a restaurant to eat it with a fork and knife with sauces and chutneys…

At that point I saw, instead of chewing the cucumber, the man just pressed it in the middle and some pulau-like substance mixed with a few things oozed out. I was surprised to no end. I told the restaurant owner that whatever be my luck, I ought to eat those cucumbers.

Two cucumbers were served. After pressing them a little with a fork, the pulau came out. The pulau was mixed with small pieces of meat (what we call keema), slices of tomato and grated country cheese. I realized that all the stuffings had been put inside the boiled cucumber and finally it was fried in ghee. The same principle as our dolma of fish and potol—the only difference was here they had stuffed the cucumber with pulau, meat, tomato and cheese. Thus this was a truly superlative creation.

And what taste! It melted the moment it touched my tongue.

I had never eaten such a five-in-one dish.

I also tasted another unique item—Egyptian broad bean seeds. You must have seen the massive kegs of oil in the Alibaba film. In two or three such kegs, they put broad bean seeds and boil them overnight. After adding olive oil and some spices, they serve them from the morning. We ate them at midnight. What taste! I can still feel it in my mouth. Our pumpkin seeds are no match for this delicacy. Even Paul and Percy agreed that the soybeans of China would be far behind, never mind surpassing it.

We heard that the king and the poor—everyone ate those beans twice a day. The restaurant owner told us that some pharoah liked it so much that he had forbidden his subjects to eat these beans! Hence the reason why people talk about the whims of the pharaohs.

I picked up its Arabic name—fool.

The following is an incident from the following morning but as it is related to this item, I will narrate it here.

Dozens of nationalities like the French, the Greeks, the Italians, the English lived in Cairo. So the city was adorned with signage in languages from around the world. The following morning when we were exploring the nooks and crannies of the city, I came across a signboard that said:
Fool’s Restaurant
Paul, Percy and I noticed it together. We were lost for words and finally we burst out laughing.
‘A restaurant for stupid people?’
What did it really mean?
At that point I suddenly remembered the word fool had been used in Arabic for the broad bean dish. Not meaning stupid people. It meant this shopkeeper sold broad bean seeds. The three of us peeped inside the shop to see that all the customers had a plate of fool in front of them.

Unit 10 Lesson 4: Fitness

Read the following extract taken from a book by Francesc Miralles and Héctor García that presents readers with life-changing tools to uncover the personal "ikigai" — the Japanese word for 'a reason to live'.

Instant vacations: Getting there through meditation

Training the mind can get us to a place of flow more quickly. Meditation is one way to exercise our mental muscles. There are many types of meditation, but they all have the same objective: calming the mind, observing our thoughts and emotions, and centering our focus on a single object.

The basic practice involves sitting with a straight back and focusing on your breath. Anyone can do it, and you feel a difference after just one session. By fixing your attention on the air moving in and out of your nose, you can slow the torrent of thoughts and clear your mental horizons.

The Archer’s Secret

The winner of the 1988 Olympic gold medal for archery was a seventeen year-old woman from South Korea. When asked how she prepared, she replied that the most important part of her training was meditating for two hours each day.

If we want to get better at reaching a state of flow, meditation is an excellent antidote to our smartphones and their notifications constantly clamoring for our attention.

One of the most common mistakes among people starting to meditate is worrying about doing it “right,” achieving absolute mental silence, or reaching “nirvana.” The most important thing is to focus on the journey.

Since the mind is a constant swirl of thoughts, ideas, and emotions, slowing down the “centrifuge”—even for just a few seconds—can help us feel more rested and leave us with a sense of clarity.

In fact, one of the things we learn in the practice of meditation is not to worry about anything that flits across our mental screen. The idea of killing our boss might flash into our mind, but we simply label it as a thought and let it pass like a cloud, without judging or rejecting it. It is only a thought—one of the sixty thousand we have every day, according to some experts.

Meditation generates alpha and theta brain waves. For those experienced in meditation, these waves appear right away, while it might take a half hour for a beginner to experience them. These relaxing brain waves are the ones that are activated right before we fall asleep, as we lie in the sun, or right after taking a hot bath.

We all carry a spa with us everywhere we go. It’s just a matter of knowing how to get in—something anyone can do, with a bit of practice.

Unit 10 Lesson 5: Consumerism

We spend money for different reasons. We buy foods, clothes or everyday essentials, pay for different services, entertain people, travel to places, help others in need or invest in business and thus spend money every day. In fact, spending is a part of our life.

Spending may make us happy or unhappy depending on how and why we spend. When we spend money on things that we need and within our limit, it is good. When it becomes a compulsive behaviour, it makes life stressful.

Unnecessary spending or spending beyond one's means has some bad effects. For one thing, it may lead to financial ruin or debt, and for another, it may create unhappiness within families. People who overspend are never satisfied with what they have. They always rush for brands, fashion items, designer clothes etc.

Over a period of time, it becomes an addiction which may eventually create psychological problems. Nowadays, consumer items are displayed in stores or in advertisements in ways that create a feeling of immediate need for them. We are constantly tempted to buy, use or consume things even when we do not have a genuine need. We all need to be careful here.

Salespersons often encourage customers to buy things by flattering them: “This is a perfect match for you,” they say, or “You look so stunning in that dress.” Never forget, they say the same thing to most of their customers. It is better not to be persuaded by such words. They use these words to please customers because the more a customer buys, the higher the profit.

Overspending is not only related to shopping, it applies to other activities such as eating out. Many people buy too many items in a restaurant, only to waste the rest. It’s not a responsible attitude. We cannot simply waste food because we have money to buy it.

Young people in a shopping mall often look at an item on display and think, “Oh, I must buy this. I really need this.” They may not have the money needed in their wallet, so they use credit cards. Using them is like taking a loan. If they are not careful, loans increase which might lead to a debt-trap.

Sometimes children insist on buying things their parents cannot pay for without stretching their budget. This may happen because their friends also have them. It's not fair as it becomes a burden for the parents.

Finally, don’t get trapped by glossy advertisements on television or the Internet. You should rather ask yourself: “Do I need this?” The best way to control the habit of spending is not to think, “What do I need?” but “Can I do without it?”