India, April 17 -- It's been a while since this incident occurred but I still find myself thinking about it many years later. A colleague of mine (on the newspaper I then worked for) hung up on a phone interview with one of his sources, looking completely shell-shocked. On our asking what happened, he reluctantly shared the story. Apparently, once the interview was over and it was time for small talk, the man had asked my colleague, "Any children?" When my colleague responded in the negative, the comeback was swift: "Any problem?"

None of us could believe that anyone could be so crass as to respond to a virtual stranger like that and yet these kinds of intrusive, bordering-on-rude questions are par for the course in India, where nobody s...