Personal Space

A few weeks back in the DC metro (subway), I saw a guy, suited-booted, office-type, sitting, meditating with eyes closed and hands in a controlled open-palm, yoga posture - no, he wasn't sitting cross-legged. I'd be embarrassed to be caught doing something like that, then, and there. But it got me thinking about personal spaces, physical (and now virtual) and how we construct them, command them, or cede them and establish boundaries. I thought of how some people commandeer a wide radius of space around them (no, not wide stances). In fact it was in this country (the US) that I came across the expression "he was in my personal space" as in standing too close for comfort. In India, riding trains, waiting in line, and in other public areas, one was used to being squished like sardines with strangers, yet there was a discrete distance one kept between people one knew well. In fact, in India, the distance publicly kept between people is probably, in inverse proportion to the intimacy between them!

Quite the converse in the US, where you would be hard-pressed not to find couples sitting in public, or even in another's living room in intimate conversations with each other, in public displays of affection (or what teens call PDA), instead of chatting with their hosts; proving what? their relationship with their partner is still on fire (and not on the rocks)? 'I am such good friends with you, the host, that su casa is mi casa and...'? - while the hosts,(especially if they're Indians), look unseeingly through the PDA! It reminds me of the Namesake scene when Kal Penn's character gives his white girlfriend a 101 on Indian etiquette - no holding hands or kissing in front of the folks.

I used to attribute the appropriation of public spaces to the Western idea of individualism extending to control and dominance, - 'I am free to do what I can wherever I can'.But then I contrast this with scenes that flit through my mind

• of the poor Indian slum dweller who is 'allowed' to carry out their most personal activities in public - I don't suppose the slum dweller has much of a choice there.
• the hurried US office worker using the metro-ride to conducting their toiletry in elaborate detail from clipping nails, tweezing eyebrows, donning foundation creams, rouge, mascara and lipstick... so very like that slum-dweller.
• of the harried Indian housewife who chops her Bhindi (okra), splits her peas from the pods in the Womens' first class on Churchgate-Dadar express - at least they used to many years back - with packaged and frozen foods on the rise, they're probably now playing poker like the men in Men's compartment used to then!

Except for the slum-dweller's case, there's seems to be a weird spillage on the space-time continuum here - when one runs out of time, you begin to push outward occupying spaces you might not otherwise have occupied; can't fit your make-up chores into your time at home, use the public space to do it in. Whether the converse is true - for people who live out their lives constantly in the public space, is a topic for another time.