Betsu Betsu !

I found this hilarious passage in the description of Indian culture in an India travel guide. Quoting below.

"It is customary to put up a token friendly argument with your host or any other member of the group when paying bills at restaurant or while making purchases. The etiquette for this is somewhat complicated. If you are someone's personal guest and they take you out to a restaurant, you should offer to pay anyway, and you should insist a lot. Sometimes these fights get a little funny, with each side trying to snatch the bill away from the other, all the time laughing politely. If you don't have experience in these things, chances are, you will lose the chance the first time, but in that case, make sure that you pay the next time."

What appears apparently funny to someone from the West or any developed country is part of our daily life. I'm sure all of us would have gone through this quite a few times.

In Japan, "Going Dutch" is called "Betsu Betsu". Which literally means "separate separate" or more appropriately in Tamil "varai varai". A group of friends or acquaintances going to restaurants order what they please and when it's time to pay, say "betsu betsu" to the waiter, walk to the counter, orally say what each ate, pay ONLY for their part and walk out. This might sound crude to some of us(I was horrified !). We are more used to the "tragedy of the commons" type of, one person paying at a time and a tacit agreement that the other people pay later(which might never happen). I've always wondered why we had to settle for a dicey system of payment which is hugely biased against altruists who end up paying more often than the rest.

But the answer may not be in altruism as most of us perceive, as much as it is on the disparity of wealth in our society. Though one person is expected to pay for expenses, the unsaid expectation is that the wealthiest pays for the rest. I took the below data from bbc website.

WEALTH DISTRIBUTION IN INDIA
Top 1%: 16% of wealth
Top 5%: 38% of wealth
Top 10%: 53% of wealth
Bottom 80%: 30% of wealth
Bottom 50%: 8% of wealth
Bottom 20%: 1% of wealth
Bottom 10% 0.2% of wealth
Source: University of Western Ontario, 2006

The above disparity of wealth will certainly exist among friends or acquaintances who go out together in India. It will not be possible to do a "betsu betsu" easily as they do in an "almost equal" Japan or any other developed country. But things are changing. With the recent economic boom, the middle is slowing tending towards the top. Does it mean that we'll also start doing "betsu betsu" ? the author of the passage on Indian culture will rewrite the advisory ? maybe not !