Wednesday, August 11, 2010 at 9:02PM A trip to India to visit family, see some sights never seen, get the girls back comes to a close.
A countable number of hours before we board the flight back and get to our routine.
There are enough photos and videos to fill a Travelog for years, but more importantly we have all tucked away memories that will last a lifetime!
More when we come back...
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Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 11:40PM Today a very well read and knowledgeble Chinese American Colleague (I know he is a US Citizen) told me "India is going to vote today, huh?". They are saying the Beejaaaypeee is going to come back! Aren't these the guys who persecute moslems?
I took him aside and told him that I don't get to vote in India because of my US Citizenship. Got to vote for Obama and that was enough for a lifetime.
Power corrupts. Absoulute power corrups absolutely.
(Most south Indian's attribute this quote to C.N. Annadurai. Apparently it is from Lord Acton)
So no one knows if Obama will end his term or terms with his integrity intact. Still one can always "hope". He is doing things right so far and hopefully will continue to steer change the right way.
That said, it appears as though almost all my desi blog buddies are resoundinly saying that this year going to the polls is a waste of time because all their options are the same and they don't believe anyone is worthy of a vote.
Some have gone far enough to say that the only reason they would walk to the polls is to tick on "I choose not to vote" to make sure someone else doesnt exercise the vote in their name to a standing candidate.
Based on my limited knowledge of today's Indian politics ,explanation to my colleague was :
Congress = pseudo secular communism
BJP = religious socialism
If you have a way of explaining what these two parties stand for in three words or less, do let me know.
Relatives are all just shrugging their shoulders on talking about voting. Their response is "Yaarukkavadhu votu pottu dhane daa aaganum?" (we have to vote for someone right?") and they try to choose the lesser of the two evils.
Democracy is something, isn't it?
So much of this world has been changed, destroyed, remade in the last decade, all in the name of spreading democracy and hundreds of millions of people who are all part of a very large democracy get to choose between the devil and the deep blue sea.
Is democracy something worth losing so many lives across the globe, when politicians the world over seem to be poor choices?
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Thursday, March 26, 2009 at 11:11PM A day with my dad where he gets to talk and I get to keep quiet for once
A day with my grandpa and grandma, put my head on her lap and sleep for a minute, even if only a minute, just like when I was a small kid, put my ear to grandpas tummy and listen to rumbling noises and giggle
a trip to kapalishwar temple in mylapore with grandparents, share a goli soda with my brother, a paalgoa for each of us with a transluscent paper with the kapali temple on the paper in bright red, some kaara sevai from the ambika appalam depot, a stop at RUBY stores to buy a chandamama or champak, watch grandma bargain with the vegetable vendors
a trip to the marina with my brother and sister and some soan papdi from the cute bell jar
a jackie chan movie at alankar with my brother
walking around the srigery mutt temple behind my mom
perform topaz blade surgery on my sisters dolls with my brother as assistant surgeon
watch my dad bargain with an autorickshaw driver for 15 minutes for a trip that might take him only ten
fold clothes from the clothesline on the terrace and watch the kites
eat pori kadalai from Kapali kadalai Nilayam and savor it one rice grain at a time, and marvel at how some pori tastes a little bland, some a little salty and once in a while that single grain of arisi pori just tastes perfect!
etc.
etc.
etc.
Some of these might come true soon in some form or other. The rest will be retreived from permanent memory, savored in otherwise sad times, and be neatly tucked back in, for the sights, sounds and smells of a time long gone are still in the head, with definition better than any blue ray disk can offer, better than any photo or video ever stored.
Life takes you places, but sometimes when it takes you to the same place, there is a certain magic to it!
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Sunday, March 1, 2009 at 10:29PM Adengappa is on the receiving end right now. I completely understand what he is going through!
He is receiving condolences, sympathies for being Indian, amazement that every Indian in the USA made it out of the Indian slums, etc.
This is not a new problem and it goes both ways. Eastern perception of the west or the Western perception of the east (trust me, my Chinese grad school buddies have told me similar stories and this is not just and India USA thing) have the same issues.
In case you are not following this yet, let me give you some case studies.
Mottai or Mundan : We went to India to celebrate my daughters first birthday. As is the south Indian custom, we had our daughters hair shaved off just before her first birthday. We do not give haircuts till sometime before the kid is 9 months old and the first hair cut is a total shave and the hair is offered to gods (usually done in a temple). Grandpa says this actually helps hair take better roots and there is some hair health secret behind this. Nevertheless...
We come back to the USA after the celebration. The kid is a little tired after all the travelling. A woman at the local grocery store is all sympathetic to her. I didn't get it initially and finally figured out that she thought my daughter had cancer and was going through some kind of Radiation treatment! Why else would a kid get its hair shaved off ?!
Women who don't believe in pre-marital sex : This might get me in hot water and you might say this is generalizing, but based on the limited sample size that I have encountered, there are a lot many desi students who show up in the USA who belive that the average American woman accepts pre-marital sex as the norm and are genuinely surprised to find that to be not true!
There are Indians who don't know English : Yeah, seriously.. there were a lot of Americans I have interacted with who thought that all Indians were fluent in English, were we well "versed" in Madonna and Michael Jackson Lyrics as they were with Vedas and Upanishads. After all, why wouldn't they?! All the Indians they encountered in school spoke fluent english. One professor even thought all Indians wore a "poonal" or sacred thread. That really was something. That meant all his previous grad students were Brahmins and no one told him that it was a very small subset of the population.
All Americans are well educated : Even beggars in America beg in English and by extension, they should all be well educated! If you think this is a joke, go take a survey in the potti kadais and barber shops of Chennai and you will see that this image holds true. Truth is far from it. In India speaking English is a sign of education. Here everyone speaks english (or American) and there are people here who cannot read and write fluently but they only speak the language. The public education system here today is no different from the state of "corporation" schools in TamilNadu in the early eighties and people are just about to start chanllenging and changing this system.
Every Indian has visited the Taj Mahal : Just like the Eiffel tower shows up in the window in every hollywood movie that is supposedly shot in Paris, every desi is supposedly been to the Taj. This is almost something taken for granted by Americans. I am yet to visit the Taj Mahal and it is something to be "rectified". I also happen to have travelled the USA a lot more than the average American! Know a lot of Californians who have never visited New York or Washington DC! Seriously, I kid you not! Both India and the USA are large countries and not everyone in these countries has visited every national monument, tourist attaction, and yet.....
All Indians write software,
All Americans own guns and are trigger happy,
All desis are cheap and go to India everytime they need a root canal
etc. etc.
and the list goes on...
All Americans are war mongers : This one joined the list in 2003 after the Iraq invasion.
All of India is a slum : this has just recently joined the list, after Slumdog
There will be many more additions to the list over the coming years!
What does one do though, when faced with these situtations?!
Here is a tip. Do not laugh it off or try to be very witty. It usually does not go well in any situation in any country. Stereotyping is not something that was invented in this century. It has been happening for millenia!
Fifteen odd years ago, I made a remark that went something like "let me do the Indian rope trick or get on my elephant and go find out for you.." and it really rubbed the other person the wrong way! When I found out that the other person really believed that sterotype and the history books in China actually teach them stuff about India in a certain way, I was horrified.
Today's history and geography books in the east and west are probably teaching the kids a view of the other side that is not entirely true. Recently heard on the radio that there is less than 18 pages of total material in history and geography texts in the US about China. That is right, 18 pages for 3000+ years of history! Equally sure that the 200+ years of American modern history is seen as something that doesn't count as history in the true sense of the world. Yet an American very close to me taught me that it is not the number of years of civilization that matters, but what has been accomplished in those years. We would have arguments and he would come up things like "it took you guys almost 400 years to get Independence from the Brits and we did it in 200" and that would send me scurrying to the history books.
The best way to deal with it is to explain in a short sentence that their belief is not supported by real data and leave it at that. Remember, if you are visiting another country, you DO represent your country. Even if you have changed Citizenship, this still happens and you constantly end up reminding yourself and others of your nationality, and it doesn't get through!
As the world shrinks and communication is supposed to shrink it further as the years go by, we grow farther apart with myths and the blurred lines between real and real life which give us more organized sterotyping!
We can only hope for a better world, where more people are eager to learn about other cultures and do get to learn the truth, by traveling as opposed to a jaundiced and censored lesson provided by the press, governments and movie houses!
Happy monday folks!
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India, SSDP, USA, east and west, grass is greener, history, myths, stereotypes Tuesday, February 3, 2009 at 11:06PM Apparently the Indian goverment is learning from President Bush.
They have come up with a "No Lap left Behind" policy.
A laptop on every lap, they said and to top things off, the thing was supposed to cost 10 bucks (500 Indian Rupees)!
There has been a lot of hoopla around this over the years.
The most common reasoning out there was that it would still cost 100 bucks to make, but it could be sold by the government for 10 bucks. Well cost and price are two different things, especially when regulated by a government.. any government! You only need to look at ethanol based fuels and cars which claim to use ethanol based fuels (also) in the US to understand this!
Now where were we? Ah, the laps, sorry.. laptops!
Let us for a moment say this thingy does get called a Laptop.
It should have
a. a processor (at least the same thing in a digital watch or a basic electronic calculator)
b. some memory (lets say they have no hard drive to store info and that is an extra)
c. a keyboard to communicate to the outside world (no mice required)
d. a monitor of some sort
e. a power source (or module if it runs on batteries)
f. an outer plastic case to hold all these together as opposed to a ziploc bag
if you have to divvy up these 6 things under 10$, you are looking at some amazing manufacturing!
Truly amazing, state of the art, cost effective manufacturing as well as state of the art distribution which is free or nearly free!
Obviously a billion laps would need to be serviced here and that means cartons and cartons of laptop devices need to be shipped and transported and distributed and that should all be included in the ten buck cost!
Plus you need top {bolly,tolly,kolly}U(Wood) actresses, former desi Miss Worlds, Universe, etc. posing with "tzis device" to make it appeal to the masses.
Somehow I feel my brother is being cheated. The government officials in India are smoking some high quality pot and they are not sharing it with the tax paying people!
$ 40, very much possible. $30 is pushing it with today's manufacturing! I am serious here. You can get a plastic case, working keyboard, a simple processor that possibly does basic text editing, calculator, clock, etc. etc. a pixelized monitor without color, 128MB memory , batteries sold separately device for 40 bucks including distribution, advertising etc.
My BIL got Jr. a laptop that comes close, and it cost $50 and it is pretty educational!
In a world where a langot costs 10-15 rupees and a VIP brief for that same lap, goes for 50, a laptop at 500 rupees is too good to be true!
Who knows, maybe some day there will be a ten dollar laptop, for real!?!
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India, computer, government, laptop 