Interesting read.
As kids, we were taught how to eat neatly with our fingers, but also how to eat Indian food with cutlery when not at home in certain settings (for eg: at a standing party, or at school) while maintaining the integrity of the way the food should be eaten (dry chapati rolled up into a cigar first, take a bite before dipping the spoon into wet items to follow into the mouth).
My nephews were taught to eat with their hands at some early stage – one took to it like a duck to water, the other knows how but wants everything on his plate separate anyway – with distinct spoons if he can swing it 
This especially made me smile:
“In Bangla we call it makhani – mixing. It is a sign of love shown by parents towards their children. I find myself doing it for my son when I feed him, pressing the grains of rice and chicken with my fingertips, shaping it into small mounds that he can pop into his mouth. I remember my father doing the same for me, carefully sifting out any bones from fish and offering me mouthfuls of lovingly prepared rice. I have a cousin, a medical student in her 20s, who still asks her dad to makhai the rice for her when she goes home to visit.”
We have different names for it by language, but my dad did this too – little balls of rice on my plate, each “for” a family member if I was being fussy, and I did the same for my nephews when I’d feed them dinner when they were tiny.
My non-Indian friends took it as a challenge to learn to eat Indian food with their hands (like I did learning to use chopsticks), good for them! It helped them significantly with Ethiopian food when we discovered it.
But rice is always a hurdle, the final frontier – and yet, she’s right, I’m convinced rice actually does taste better eaten by hand 
