Let’s say you are at an American diner. And it is in America. You ask for a table, the waiter seats you, and he brings some menus when he has a moment. During the whole time, he refers to you as “sir” or “ma’am”, and service is good.

Now lets say you meet that same waiter off-duty the next weekend. You are shopping at a mall, he is shopping at the same mall, and the two of you cross paths. There is no waiter uniform, and there is no “sir” or “ma’am” either. He’s just an average joe doing some shopping, and you are too. Maybe there will be a “hi” or “hello”, but the formalities and respectful means of addressing ones customer are left behind.

Indeed, if you keep bumping into each other outside of the restaurant environment, they might even stop calling you “sir” or “ma’am” altogether. You now have a relationship outside the formalities of customer/staff, and so things revert to the informalities of American culture.

Malls are expensive places for most Indians, and waiters might make one-tenth or even one-fiftieth of what people working in the professional sectors earn here. So you are unlikely to repeat the exact same scenario in New Delhi. But you could conceivably bump into someone you knew as a waiter in an open-air market or just walking down the street.

Only difference is, they are likely to still address you as sir.

It would be considered very rude by many members of India’s upper classes to be addressed on an informal first-name basis by someone who worked for them in a service capacity. There are certainly exceptions, including maids or servants who helped raise a child. Even when that child becomes an adult, they will still recognize the original parent-child relationship in their modes of address. And certainly many upper income employers address their service staff — especially if the servants are older — with terms of respect. But overall, when it comes to talking to your wealthy employer, there’s no such thing as a first-name basis. “Sir”, “-ji”, etc — these are permanent titles.

You aren’t just doing a different job than your employer — many perceive you to actually be a lesser person than your employer. And unlike the United States, few in India’s upper classes would ever think of working as a waiter or waitress. The salary differences are so great, the class-based stigma so large, that it would be unthinkable to spend a summer “waiting tables” to come up with some spending cash for college.