Opinion Japanese ambassador eats Biryani with his hands. Others can learn from his openness

When travelling is reduced to an item on a bucket list and #wanderlust serves as a mere stepping stone to greater social media clout, a simple act can be a reminder of what it really means to be in another land whose riches, to quote the writer Pico Iyer, are differently dispersed. One such act was the choice made by Japan’s Ambassador to India, on a recent visit with his team to Delhi’s Andhra Bhavan, to decline the use of a spoon to eat the canteen’s justly famous biryani. Seated before a fragrant plateful, he used his hands and emulated the Indian diners around him.

This is soft diplomacy done well, as the virality of the visit’s video has shown. Warmth responds to warmth, an understanding that is lost amidst the loud chest-beating of today’s global politics. And what better context for this than a meal? Long before McDonald’s, food was already a carrier of ideas and beliefs, trailing revolutions and reinventions in its wake. If one outcome of this long history of churn is the global menu of the 21st century on which nothing — from paneer tikka pizza to matcha latte — is too alien or exotic, the other is the recognition that hierarchy has no room at the dining table.

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In a world beset by growing provincialism, and a fortress mentality that narrows the vision to only that which can be seen through an arrowslit, a simple gesture from the representative of a country with its own elaborate dining etiquette becomes a call to widen the aperture and invite differences of every kind into the frame.