I think there is also an incestual nature to indian communities (and by incestual i dont mean it literally...)
I have this friend who is a shopkeeper in a small north western town in Kenya. His family has lived in Kenya for over a 100 years. When the guy got married 15 years back, he married a woman from the same indian community. I met him 6 months ago in nairobi, and I asked him what he was doing here, since it seemed out of his way. His story was this: Things were not going well with the wife. From his point of view, she was boring and dull, she sat at home and ate jalebi all day. So the guy was on the look out for a mistress to add some spice to his life. This is a small country with a finite number of indians, so clearly getting a local indian mistress was out of the question (too many familiar people). So, instead, the guy imported a mistress all the way from Jamnagar, and additionaly, the mistress was from his own community. He put her up in a different corner of the small town, away from the prying eyes of his wife. What surprised me was, it never occured to the guy to look for an African mistress... when I suggested it to him, he was quite horrified in an unusually self righteous way, in terms of what other people would think of him if they knew he had an african mistress. It did not appear wrong to him to have a mistress, but it was wrong to have an african mistress ! On 3/12/07, Biju Chacko wrote:
In Botswana, at least, this *could* have been a pretty casual conversation -- possibly because sex itself was pretty casual. Odd, really. You'd think that, with the population we have, there'd be a lot of sex going on and Indians would be less repressed about it out of sheer familiarity. I guess Indians mostly reproduce asexually. -- b
