The Exotic Effect

It was the first snowfall this season in Seoul. It started in the afternoon just before lunch - very light to start with. As time went by, the intensity increased. Before long it was snowing heavily, covering everything in a blanket of white. I enjoyed it from the comfort and warmth of my lab. It was a delightful scene for me. Interestingly the snowfall caused many status messages to change on Facebook. For some, it was the first snowfall and the feeling reflected in their words. For some it brought back memories of horrible winters and the sufferings associated with it. Its strange to observe how the same thing elicits such diverse response in different groups of people. I call this the Exotic Effect.
My first brush with this occurred almost 12 years back - when I was still in primary school and we had a week-long camp on Environmental Awareness. It was organised by an Indian lady working for some environmental agency in Florida. That was for the first time I came to know the reason behind the craze for sunbathing. She didn't use the word 'tan' - just saying that the 'foreigners' wanted to have skin color like ours. She also said that they were vulnerable to UV rays which might cause skin cancer - if the earth's atmosphere failed to absorb a major portion of the UV rays.
It has been a long time since the environmental camp. I had almost forgotten about it, till I say the status messages. People staying in big cities yearn to spend some time in the countryside, far away from the crowd and the sounds of the city. For people staying in rural areas, a trip to the city is a special day. I was surprised by westerners interest in places like Varanasi, which apart from the religious values, is despised by many Indians of my generation due to the narrow and dirty streets and ghats, the crowd and the confusion and the pollution of the river. Interestingly, it is these very qualities that make Varanasi interesting to outsiders. Traditional market place is one such interesting observation - which incidentally happens to be hunting grounds for portrait photographers. People going about their daily business are often surprised by the fact that someone is actually taking interest and photographing something that is so commonplace for them. The very person would probably do the same thing, if he saw a skyscraper or an aeroplane.
Sometime back I was having a conversation with a person, on our way to a lake-side barbecue. It was summer in southern Germany and on the weekend some of us planned to spend the afternoon by the lake. He was from London and had been working in the same small university town where I lived. When I recall, that was the first time I actually used the word Exotic Effect. He was saying how it was difficult to plan an open air bbq in London - since the weather was so fickle and most of the time it was cloudy and gloomy. He also said that many of his friends, who were born and brought up in London and continued to live and work there, go out to the countryside of the weekends and how he, was rather bored by the small town and wanted to go to a nightclub in Stuttgart (the nearest big city). As a matter of fact - one of his friends was getting married in a small village in Spain. I was rather surprised - "Isn't that rather troublesome to get married in a different country and that too in a small village?". He said that his friend had a fascination for the exotic. I said that it was not just his friend but all of us are fascinated by the exotic.
He then recalled how he was surprised in Malaysia, where he went for a voluntary teaching program - to see women in the fish market applying some kind of ointment on their skin, early in the morning. Out of curiosity he asked them about it and found out that it was "Fairness cream" - whose end result is to reduce the melanin content of the skin. He also said that he know many people staying in London who wanted to retire in the Mediterranean region, where there was plenty of sun. On the other hand, some of his friends in Spain, wanted to settle in London - they were tired of the sun and wanted to go someplace cooler.
I don't know why I wrote this article. May be it has something to do with the fact I have immersed myself into the psychology of human learning for the past few days (as part of an assignment in Cognitive Machine learning) and it seems to have made me look into human behavior in a more analytical way.