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”