It's common enough that you can call it Indian head wobble.

Not all Americans are fat, you can still talk about the American obesity problem even if a few of the states are fitter than the European average.

People talk about American accent, but a Texan, a Californian and a New Yorker (just to pick 3 of many examples) will sound very distinct.

People talk about beer tasting German, but it's very distinct between Bavaria and Cologne.

Not talking about the Indian head wobble is just unnecessary hair splitting. It's an interesting phenomenon which is spread widely enough in India and throughout the Indian diaspora that you can call it that.

> Not talking about the Indian head wobble is just unnecessary hair splitting. It's an interesting phenomenon which is spread widely enough in India and throughout the Indian diaspora that you can call it that.

I don't know if you're Indian or very familiar with India, but this really is not true.

I'm from Punjab and the first time I travelled to Karnataka the head wobble was something of a culture shock to me. The way people constantly shook their heads to signal being attentive towards another person who is speaking, the way I saw an auto driver do a slow 180-degree shake to signal "yes I'm familiar with the address" while I thought he was trying to say "I've never heard of that place in my life", we have nothing similar in Punjab or its neighbouring states.

Maybe it's common in the Indian diaspora, because there is a lot of cross-Indian-state intermixing outside India, but that is not the case within India itself.

I have seen it in Pakistani Punjab, from an employee of the PTDC office in Lahore

Unless you've also seen the South Indian headshake, you might not know exactly what I meant by the culture shock. No Punjabi would do a long, slow sweep of their head to say "yes".

If you have to be that specific, perhaps the employee picked it up elsewhere? ;)

India is more diverse than you or I can imagine, so it really makes no sense to compare it with the likes of the US or Germany. Heck, I would argue that the vast majority of countries are perfectly homogenous relative to India.

Sounds like your "Correct Overgeneralization" :)

I'm from a neighbour state Kerala and we don't have this head wobble.

My colleague (a Kerala native) begs to differ :)

That's not to say there isn't an 'indian head wobble'. It doesn't mean everyone or even most indians wobble their heads, or that there aren't people outside india who do so too, but that there are people in india who wobble their head, and it has come to be identified with india.

The writer is an Indian and lives in Bangalore.

And I agree that he is overgeneralizing. There are a lot of people that i come across who don't do this wobble. But in IT hubs (Hyd, Bng etc) it does seems to a general behavior.

Ditto for “Indian accent”. There are hundreds of Indian accents.

If you don't have an ear for specific accents they start to sound very similar/the same.

There are hundreds of British (or Chinese, Japanese etc) accents. But unless you are familiar with them, and often the language they speak most (as you tend to change your accent for speaking a different language) they all sound unbelievably similar.

"British accent" "Irish accent" "American accent" "Chinese accent"

Geninuely curious, where in India this is pretty common?

South India.

It's surprising how even the most educated western, either Europeans or Americans are unaware of this fact. So many times people would go, "he/she doesn't look very Indian".