Who are you friendly to?

I had a friend from America who planned to visit India for work purposes. It was her first time to India, so as expected, she read up extensively before visiting the country. She read about the temples, the beaches and the culture (well, based on whatever she could find on the internet) and then felt brave enough to travel. Since she was travelling to an unknown country for 3 months and didn't speak the language, her anxiety seemed justified. But when she did land here, she was completely taken by surprise. While there were many reasons for her surprise, one of her most interesting questions was: "How are people so friendly around her?"

"What? People in India are friendly? Really?", I asked her. She thought a while and said, "well, they are friendly to me!". When I probed her a little more, she said "you know, come to think of it, I notice that they are really friendly to me. However, when I see them speaking with each other, friendliness isn't noticeable in their body language". She couldn't confidently put a finger on this observation since she didn't understand their language, but she noticed it multiple times to come up with a theory.

I should add a quick disclaimer here that when we had this discussion, it was towards the fag end of her 3 month visit and we also debated about how she defined 'friendliness' to exclude the possibility of it being a euphemism for 'kiss ass'. So time taken to collect enough sample data, check. Friendly = Friendly, check.

Who are we most friendly towards?

1. Someone who has the potential to be important to us, i.e., someone whom we can benefit from monetarily, influentially, etc.
2. Someone who has the potential to benefit from us, i.e. someone we can inspire, teach, pay off to fuel our hero complex.
3. Someone whom we connect to on intellectual levels. This category however requires a conversation before the friendliness is displayed.

This theory does not apply to life partners or childhood friends since we mutually agreed that the area was inexplicably grey and we only had three hours to finish dinner before the hotel manager kicked us out. If you are still interested, I attempted to write about it last year ("Friends")

Type 1 is most often noticed and most of us wouldn't even argue about its existence because it is so common. Type 2 is also just as common, however most of us will not confess to it because, well, its not 'heroic' if you call yourself a 'hero'. Type 3 is a very interesting one - not a lot of people have the luxury to have connected with many (due to opportunities from their work lifestyle, home lifestyle, how itchy their travel bug is, etc.). Type 3 is not very rare, but it isn't very commonly noticed either. The reason being, you will discover your feelings of friendliness only after the interaction has taken place and this would make you seek their company again so that your brain gets some more exercise.

My friend is American-Asian and she clearly stood out in a room full of chocolate. On multiple occasions, I've noticed how my indian friends went out of their way to make her feel comfortable for reasons of the Types 1 and 2 category. Once she went back home to America, I realised many of those who exhibited Types 1 or 2 retracted their friendliness because they didn't think it was worth it after long conversations with her.

This made me later think if Type 1 and 2 are entry barriers into Friendship, but Type 3 is what is required for Sustenance.

If this theory makes no sense to you, all I want to say is that: We had Thai food. Clearly, our mind could have been playing games with us!