The Sin of Touching Books with Your Feet

Watching Wicked (2024) was an emotional experience. I cried when Elphaba and Galinda touched hands. I gasped when Cynthia Erivo sang. I cried again when Elphaba and Galinda parted ways during “Defying Gravity.” But one moment made my skin crawl for an entirely different reason — during “Dancing Through Life,” a dapper Prince Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey) waltzes through the college library, casually stepping on books — not just stepping, but kicking them aside. I felt viscerally how some feel about nails on a chalkboard.

Shobhit Bakliwal, a software developer in Bengaluru, recalls a similar cultural collision at a party. An American, on his first trip to India, was holding a book — How to Win Friends and Influence People — at a house party. When he was handed a drink, he couldn’t find a place to put down his book, so he placed it on the floor. 

A subtle discomfort rippled through the room. The American didn’t realize he’d stumbled into a cultural taboo — one so automatic that many follow it without ever having been explicitly taught: books must never touch the floor, and feet must never touch books. “People weren’t upset,” Bakliwal said. “But we just let him know, it’s not kosher to do that.”