Never the twain shall meet

Rudyard Kipling could not have been more correct when he wrote this verse, considering the differences in each trivial occurrence of mundane living in both the countries – India from where I hail and US from where I write this.

Having been amidst modern living and amenities in India, having had sneak previews of the ways of living in the US through re-runs of American sit-coms in India, and feeling well-equipped for life in the US, everyday came with handful of surprises for me.

I am still trying to figure out why the ‘Inscrutable American’ wants to use some warped form of cgs units when the whole world moves on mks. This leaves souls like me who have been conditioned to think in km/hr for speed and ask for liters of petrol (I still need to learn to call that gas) quite flabbergasted. So I need to do a quick calculation, that with great endeavor I have memorized, every time weight has pounds as suffix or distance has miles.

It does not stop here. Didn’t we think that for any electric appliance when the indicator light is on, the appliance is active? But oh no, you can struggle to switch it on as much as you want, because here for the appliance to be on the indicator light has to go off. As if the efforts you made in switching on the DVD player weren’t enough- to add to the confusion all the toggle switches go the other way. So unlike how we do it back home, one needs to toggle the switch up for the fan to start working.

You learn to live with it, but there seems to be more. We all know weather is fickle by nature, it changes with the season. So we would experience three months of heat, three months of rain and the pattern continues. But calling weather fickle is an understatement here. Life is planned around what would be the weather the next day – or more precisely the next hour. Sun would be bright and shiny a minute ago, you turn your back and you hear this prattle of rain. The only saving grace is the impeccable predictions available at click of the mouse, but I thought summer meant three months of heat!

To shake my underlying beliefs some more, there is advertising in this country. First principle of advertising I learnt in B-School in India– ‘tell about the qualities of the product, harp and harp some more on how great it is’. So I switch on the TV expecting the same blowing of the trumpet during the commercial breaks – but what I hear sounds more like disparaging statements a competitor would utter. There is rattled a laundry list of what can go wrong if you use the product. If it is a pharmaceutical product the list just grows longer. The laws in the country force the disclaimers to be louder than the benefits of using the product. How they manage to sell with all that is still a mystery to me.

Just before coming here, I was subjected to these incessant ramblings from all my acquaintances on the cultural differences between the two countries. I ignored most of it – after all I belong to this new generation of twenty-somethings with a global outlook. I was sure nothing can surprise me. I could not have been more wrong. My generation could have come out of the attitude of treating divorce as a social stigma. We don’t push the topic under the carpet, but we also are not ready to shout about it on national television. My conviction in the breadth of my outlook was quite shaken when I witnessed this game show where the competing teams were of ex-wives versus ex-husbands! Guess the battle for them just continues – unfortunately million of viewers are a witness to it.

Till there is a huge metamorphosis where we back home start swearing by football rather than cricket, giving way to others to go before us, make accommodations for handicapped a necessity, give the right of way to pedestrians, tip profusely for every service and adhere strictly to a 9 to 5 work schedule, these words will always be true

“Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet”

Learning From Each Other

The debate over the best method to impart knowledge has been perennial – whether it needs to be a monologue, an interaction, experiential or theoretical.

Coming to a grad school in the United States and having experienced a grad school in India helps me realize that learning from each other is possibly the most impactful form of imparting education to adults. The underscore here is on the word ‘adult’, where the imparter of knowledge works with an assumption that the seeker of knowledge is a mature individual who has a personal goal to fulfill when she enrolls for the course.

This assumption is inhering to the primary approach to teaching where the text-books and theory don’t serve as crutches to fill the time in the class. The teacher’s main role then remains to encourage every student to share some piece of experience which they believe is related to the topic at hand. The gravity, depth and relevance of experience is immaterial, the essence of the approach is that whatever the student chooses to share, it is heard with respect and is discussed further to relate it to the topic at hand.

The benefits of this approach are umpteen. Most prominently, the respectful hearing helps the student come out of what Peter Senge writes in his book ‘The Fifth Discipline’ – our instinctive belief in our powerlessness and unworthiness. He states that most individuals hold a belief that we are unable to bring into being all things we care about (powerlessness) and we do not deserve what we truly desire (unworthiness). The simple act of sharing their experiences and understanding them better, unconsciously helps the students in overcoming these beliefs.

The second big advantage is that others learn the difficult art of ‘listening’. Myriad times one misses those little nuggets of knowledge because of the feeling of ‘been there and done that’. The ‘listening’ that the student does in the class, helps her reinforce the existing knowledge and enhance it some more.

The beauty of the approach of the teacher espousing the role of the facilitator and the students sharing and listening is that the complete process helps a true learner in ways beyond the knowledge of the text.

Mind and Intellect: The Yin and the Yang

Mind’s restlessness is the one source behind all our emotions and hence our actions. It is like a big bundle of energy, never at rest – generating a perennial stream of thoughts.

Intellect on the other hand is more stable. It helps us reflect, contemplate and understand. In an average individual, intellect may sound reactive compared to a restless proactive mind.

On deeper understanding, intellect is found to be a more stable version of the mind. It can be described as mind with all its energy channelised into a mature state. Mind and intellect can hence be compared to yin and yang in Taoism - each complementing the other, completing the other and continuously transforming into each other.

It needs to be pointed out here that there are no connotations attached to either the mind or the intellect – doing so would again be a trick of the mind. The understanding needs to come objectively. There are umpteen practical realities of the world which cannot be lived without the thoughts and actions generated by the mind. The goal but remains to limit the control the mind exercises on our actions to the fulfillment of these practical realities. The goal of a true knowledge seeker still would be the attainment of a deeper intellect that guides our actions and emotions.

Many paths have been defined in all time periods for achieving this state of deep intellect. The names given to this state are also different for different paths. Some prescribe an experiential method for achieving this state; some prescribe the method of theory, knowledge and understanding while some prescribe a balance of both extremes. Each knowledge seeker needs to choose the method that would help him achieve his goal. The path also need not be one or same over time. As the maturity of the knowledge seeker grows, the paths might cross, re-cross and separate again.

The one factor though that remains constant in this journey is practice. The practice here describes both the formal, dedicated time for rehearsing the prescribed technique and equally importantly, making the understanding borne out of it a way of life.

Life would also throw surprise tests at the knowledge seeker to check the depth and progress of the learning – to see whether the intellect goes back to a restless state of mind at the trigger of a difficult situation. The objective is to reduce the time it takes for the restless mid to come back to the state of a stable intellect in the event of a difficulty.

With perseverance, a dedicated knowledge seeker would continuously reduce this time of transformation from intellect to mind to intellect so that his decisions and actions are guided continually and solely by a deep state of intellect and he moves further ahead on the path of spiritual bliss.