Man Hug…Misunderstood

It is always amazing on how things are understood differently based on ones cultural background and upbringing. Being a dude from India I know it is quite common for boys, even grown up adults for that matter, to hold hands or even casually wrap hand around the shoulders of friends while walking on public roads. No one finds it unusual in that country and the setting.

Why am I talking about this now?

Here’s the situation. One of my colleagues had a minor stroke recently and was out of action for a couple of weeks. We were fortunate that these were minor strokes and he had his family around to take care of him immediately. All my colleagues were so concerned about him. He was eventually cleared to get back to work and he showed up promptly at office today, thanks to his loving wife, he got tired of her being over protective and wanted to take a break. I was so happy to see him back in office and I gave him a “Hearty Man Hug”. Another colleague of mine standing right behind me says “I am not gay, so I’ll just shake your hand”. I know he said that in a lighter vein and didn’t mean to be hurtful to me or anyone for that matter.

It sounded very funny to me, at that instance, given that I have so many friends, boys to be precise, that I must have held hands with when I was a kid and even in college. That’s when this thought crossed my mind as to why one should be “Culturally Aware” while exhibiting affection in the public. This is precisely the reason why I had to dump a couple of pink shirts I had when I moved from India to the USA.

Facebook is making us miserable

I have come across an article By Mr. Daniel Gulati in Harvard Business Review about how Facebook is making people’s lives miserable. I happen to agree 100% with the author on this one. While I have recognized the uses and in fact leveraged those myself to find new friends, long lost friends, share the events happening in my life with my circle of friends etc., it has also taken away some of my time that I would rather spend in real world and not the virtual world. We are losing personal connections as simple as picking up a phone and talking to a person etc. ratherthan messaging them on Facebook etc. we are also not meeting as often as we should because you are meeting virtually. Another challenge is we almost always happen to share only the positive jthings happening in our lives making other people jealous or worse making them think that our lives are happy pappy and not have those conversations with friends and loved ones that are essential to help us think straight at times and get back to normalcy after a particularly difficult experience.

You all should read this one to mend your FB habits, if need be, if you are like me.

Immigration, culture and language

I was working late in the evening this Friday ( nothing new there :-)). I had misplaced my iPhone charger. I was trying to figure out if I had left it in one of the conference room as that’s where I have been spending a lot of time. It has been an unusually busy December so far. Which is a good thing from work perspective. Anyway, as I mentioned, it was late in the evening and there wasn’t a single soul in the office. I bumped into one of our house keeping persons, a janitor, whom I’ve seen in the past but except for a courteous nod, we’ve never spoken.

This time I wanted to ask him if he has seen a charger that I misplaced, unfortunately he doesn’t know English. We tried hard to communicate, me waving my iPhone in front of him and pointing to another power cable etc. it took a while for us to eventually get on the same page. He signed he hasn’t seen any and I moved on. After grinding out another couple of hours and cranking out few more slides for an upcoming presentation next week, I got on the road.

I turned on my radio and Kai Razdal was announcing the new deal that he EU leaders reached on Friday to save the euro. While listening to how the world economy is stinking and how the world leaders are not able find a solution, my touts floated around a bit and went back to those couple of minutes where I was speechless in front of the house cleaner in my office.

Europe, a land of culturally diverse nations is trying to unify economically and otherwise. Their common currency is euro and common language has got to be English. Here I am, a temporary migrant to US trying to communicate with another migrant. While it is essential that all the migrants maintain some of their cultural roots despite the country they live in, isn’t it necessary that we all learn a language that we can communicate. It may not be necessary, if you happen to live in the same country, to learn a new language but shouldn’t prep learn the language if venturing into a foreign land where communication becomes and essential tool to get employment and other necessities.

I think I am blessed that way by being born in India. We have no option but to learn English in order to communicate among people from different states. I think you will not find that culturally diverse environment anywhere else in the world. Indians have built so many temples and cultural centers in US, one would hardly miss the home land, but they all happen to speak English, thought it could be funnily accented at times.

I remembered a story on NPR about the state of Pennsylvania trying to save 100s of millions of dollars by not printing all government and public services forms in spanish. No wonder the economy is making every one to cut corners, but we immigrants can definitely help by learning the language of the land, if not for the cost savings, but at least help out other  human beings by communicating in a common language and not having to resort to the sign language that our fore fathers have dumped thousands of years ago. We should help our own cause and not push the locals to become more defensive and close minded.

Memories of my village…Date Palms

I bumped into this picture on my laptop screen saver. It was picked up from my picture archives from my visit to my village a couple of years ago. I went down the memory lane which took me to my childhood days. It reminded me of all the summers I have spent in the fields, the various crops we struggled to raise and make our livelihood and a lot of fun I had as well.

The picture you see is of a “Date Palm” tree. The fruits were so tasty that we did not mind getting poked by a thorn or two in the process of cutting them down. When I was a kid, I used to study in a nearby town, away from my small, remote village. The best memories of my childhood are from the summers I spent in my village. It gave me a chance to get back to my roots and experience the life of a farmer.

We used to cut down the bunches (the orange green fruits you see in the picture) and bury them in the sand. This used to speed up the ripening process (due to the severe heat during summer and believe me, the place where I hail from is practically a desert with no sources of water except for the rainfall during the monsoons).

Date Palm

We used to be so secretive about the locations we hide these fruits, because kids from the nearby villages would steal them, if they get to know our secret hide outs. At times we used to hide them in hay stacks, as this would have the same effect and possible keep them away longer from other kids. There used to be raids in the middle of the night (mostly full moon days as we used to be scared to venture out in the dark). Our village, despite its proximity to smaller to mid-sized towns, was so remote that we did not have electricity until 1989. It was a struggle for the adults in the village to get on the same page and persuade the local politicians and lobby for electricity. Anyway, that is a story for another day.

Every day early in the morning, while it is still dark, we used to go harvest the ripened fruits and change the hide out again. Another fact about these trees is that the government used to auction them to contractors who would extract Palm Wine (or Toddy) and sell it in the nearby villages and towns. Even though I was curious, I never tasted that stuff for two reasons. One, I was a good boy then 🙂 and two, one would never drink that stuff if you see the hoards of wild life (insects, flies, bees, small crickets etc.) that flock to these small earthen pots, used to collect the liquid, and die in those pots, not to mention the stinking odor. The staff used to just filter these dead beings out, adulterate with some water, transfer them to plastic cans and ship them to the shops that sell it.

As they say “a picture is worth thousand words”, I guess many of my friends who have similar background and experience of an Indian village life will be able to relate to this quite well. I thought I’d document the story related to this picture, because someday in the future, I might find it amusing to read and ruminate over it or if my kids bump into it, they could get thoroughly embarrassed about the fact that their father lived in a village so remote that it did not have electricity for a long time.

As always, your comments are welcome.

The craze of “Kolaveri Di”…reaches NPR in the US

I was returning from office this evening at around 8 PM. I usually have my car radio tuned in to NPR (90.9 WHYY). In my view the most neutral source of news in the US. Anyway, It is very rare that I hear stories about any local Indian language movies or music on NPR. In fact, thanks to the success of “Slumdog Millionaire”, I heard about ARR’s Music tour in the US this summer.

But, when the news reader mentioned “Kolaveri Di“, I couldn’t believe it. Subha, my wife mentioned about this song a few days back. I reluctantly listened to it. I did not like it the first time. Usually I love melody music. However, I do like songs that have roots in folk music though. This song was the later kind. It was also an experiment with mostly English lyrics, mixed in with Tamil. This is not uncommon in India, where we mix a little bit of English in all our languages. Tamilians, I should say are kind of an exception to it. It was amazing to hear that this song went viral and is popular all over India. Last I checked, the Youtube video had 16 million hits.

Anyway, I am glad that things that happen in India are becoming mainstream news across the world and the creativity is being appreciated as well. I feel happy whenever a good story makes it out of India, into main stream news in the US and this was one such instance I thought of sharing.