HOW DO you feel about tourists?

When I lived in the Bay Area I loved showing visitors how to use BART and answering their questions on safety and sights in San Francisco or Berkeley. While most tourists don't get in the way of natives going about their day, a few rubbed me the wrong way, and you've probably had the same experience.

Many white people in the U.S., particularly in the Bay Area, are tourists when it comes to Hinduism.

Overall, I enjoy helping them navigate that unfamiliar territory, but a few get on my nerves. I'm trying to understand why.

Like Buddhism and Sikhism, I came from Hinduism.

My dad is a Hindu priest, and our house had Hindu idols all over the place. Hinduism was rituals, big vegetarian meals, hospitality and respect for parents and teachers. It wasn't "about" anything, any beliefs; a fish isn't "about" water.

My parents taught me a pantheist brand of Hinduism, and I knew Hinduism encompassed many sects, so I reasoned that Hinduism encompassed every possible belief system. It took me a bit of growing up to realize that not everyone is "a Hindu and doesn't realize it."

We all grow up and recognize the water we swim in has a particular hue; the woman, the immigrant, the non-heterosexual, the handicapped, and (in the U.S.) the non-Christian realize that a little earlier.

America says you should work hard to get what you want, thus avoiding frustration; Buddhism points out that you can achieve the same result by simply stopping your desires, and the Hinduism my parents taught me had echoes of that. Somehow the conflict inherent in a Hindu overachiever didn't come up.

I once told my mother that I was becoming a Buddhist and renouncing worldly things. This was fine with her until I declared that this also applied to eating dinner.

My ploy to avoid eating failed spectacularly.

Hinduism, it's said, is more a way of life than a religion. I've met white Americans who dabble in theory and practice Hindu, Buddhist and Sikh traditions. (Heather Gold, a comedian I know, jokes that she's the only Jew in San Francisco who's not a Buddhist.) But do they take off their shoes when they come home? Do they avoid hugging people of the opposite sex?

There's a lot of great inspiration and tradition in Hinduism, to be sure. Hindus and followers of traditions springing from Hinduism have taught masses of people in the West to meditate.

And I've babbled on in these pages about the Bhagavad-Gita, the Mahabharata and other insightful classics of Hindu mythology.

But living in a place, or in a way of life, is a wholly different experience than reading about it or taking a class, or even practicing some of its tenets or rituals.

The veteran looks askance at amateur strategists; the house painter knows that a dilettante artist isn't doing the same job he is. And someone living in Fremont sees the Bay Area quite differently from even a regular visitor to San Francisco.

It's not all great. It's not all sourdough and skyline. Growing up Hindu, I saw charity and love and serenity, sure, but I also saw don't-rock-the-boat passivity, the ugly scars of the caste system, and shame. And the purity taboos that my parents taught me still make my life harder. I find it uncomfortable to wear street clothes inside my house, or to give or receive things with the left hand.

So how do you feel about tourists — people who want to rent your way of life for an hour? It's impossible. To visit a tradition without living it is to treat it as a buffet, to make a pastiche completely unmoored from cultural context.

And that's how Christians probably feel about me. I ooh and aah over cathedrals and friezes, I read Christian blogs and can quote lines of Scripture, but I will probably never convert. They might be glad I'm interested, but if I act as though it's a theory or a hobby, they might feel peeved that I'm treating their life so lightly.

The postmodern, syncretic impulse confuses those who live in the appropriated culture. It's disorienting. Sometimes it's a refreshing new perspective, but sometimes it's irritating; the tourist will never Get It the way the native does. But the tourist probably Gets It a different way, and that's what I should remember.

Sumana Harihareswara writes for Bay Area Living each week. You can write to her at sumana@crummy.com.