How are you?

If there’s one question that we rarely give a genuine answer that would be it.  ‘How are you?’ as a greeting therefore is quite stumping.

Indeed one may say it’s really preposterous that people keep greeting others with ‘how are you’ even during these difficult pandemic days and we continue to reply with the usual ‘good’ or ‘not bad’ despite the hardships. Out of habit we both pose the question and respond in that ‘accepted’ way. We hardly question the logic behind it.
‘How are you’ as a greeting is deemed essentially western. For instance India has its ‘namaste’ which means ‘I bow to the divine in you’. Interestingly with pandemic restricting the handshake many westerners including Prince Charles and French President Emmanuel Macron were seen greeting each other with a ‘namaste’ instead of the traditional handshake followed by ‘how are you’.

Up until three four decades back here in Sri Lanka, the adults especially the elderly when they bump into each other on the road used to greet each other with a ‘are you going out?” (beherak yanawada). It was never ‘how are you’ as first greeting. However of late things have changed drastically with the Sinhala equivalent of how are you ‘Ithin kohomada’ taking over.

Interestingly in the eastern tradition the Chinese seemed to have a unique way of greeting with a ‘have you had your meal?’ and in northern China including old Beijing this greeting is apparently still practiced by the elders. It is believed that it came into being with the scarcity of food in the country in the olden days.

As for ‘how are you’, it goes without saying the greeting often confuses the greeted. Even if one is down in the dumps or going through some traumatic period psychologically the person is forced to think of a ‘better’ answer just to save face. As such it is assumed that most of the cases of ‘not bad’ should be deciphered as either ‘somewhat bad’ if not ‘quite bad’. On the other hand the over confident response, ‘good’ if decoded often times goes as ‘not bad’.

Another reason as to why the question ‘how are you?’ baffles one is because as individuals it’s not always that we gauge our situation and prepare ourselves to answer that question. The question is after all about the sum total of our experience. On the other hand times like this where pandemic has turned systems topsy-turvy and conditions are difficult to everyone a question like ‘how are you?’ just for the sake of asking can make one feel really helpless. It’s a question one is generally expected to give a ‘good’ answer and save face but given the circumstances one can only wish that one could offer a good one.