to a foreigner, this cultural difference may be viewed with amusement. in a culturally diverse world, sometimes there is no superiority. eating with bare hands is still practiced by some today.
some gentlemen would wise up & buy food back to office to 'beat the crowd', or he may not get any seat even after his meal break is up.
You are a wise man with wise thoughts. I agree superiority lies not in the form but in the substance,, the soul, the spirit and mind. He who feels not any superiority is the most superior of all. Eating with hands is not an issue as far as i am concern. It is an ethinical culture , practice, and societal rule for some, and should be respected by others. You cant equate that practice with this of choping a seat with tissue paper.
Today, i had a group discussion with many of my friends on this subject. We touched on many grounds on issue relating to this practice.
Basically, my points are:
1. i need to make a difference between "reserving" and "choping". To many it is the same thing,, but i beg to differ.
2. I am not against reservation,, but i am against choping.
3. When a person reserves a seat,, there are many compeling reasons,,, like father and son or family sharing a table; a person carrying a lot of shopping items, a worker having a handful of files, a group of handicapped persons making a stopover for a meal, etc etc,,, and we look at the needs, the size, the number of seats taken, the way the seats are reserved,,, there has to be a substantiated reason for reserving a seat.
4. Choping is different,, it is just one of many office workers, simply placing a pack of tissue paper on an empty seat and claim "Preda Branca",,, and taking advanctage of others' kindness of not wishing to rake a fight. The practice is so prevalent now that many would think it neither right or wrong to do this. This is morally wrong, because this practice compromises other people's opportunity of using the seat, and these could be those who had arrived earlier but went straight ahead to buy their food first.
5. Often, what is considered as practical, time saving exercise to chope a seat often results in wasted opportunity for others who could have used the seats but prevented from doing so by such sheer lack of considerate practice.
6. In the global economy, we have witnessed how, overr the past 7-8 years, the industry has invented new ways to lose money when the old ways seemed to work just fine. Similarly, the old ways of using the seats were just fine and graceful when everyone respects another person's right of use without introducing the new tissue paper method to rob fellow citizen of the gracefulness of being courteous towards other seat users.