Random Ruminations

There's nothing like going to a foreign country, especially one with a very different culture than yours, to really make you "see" the world differently. I was prepared for a certain amount of culture shock when I went to India, but after all the research I'd done, what surprised me more was how easily I adjusted to seeing so many people out at all times of the day and night (in urban areas not out in the country), and how quickly I adapted to my new surroundings.

As I see myself as more "beige" than white, it surprised me that my presence in the New Delhi airport waiting to board the flight for Trivandrum seemed to be of interest to a number of people. I was aware of Indians examining me from head to toe with curiosity. It didn't feel rude or intrusive; it just was.

I remember the elderly Indian couple in the terminal who looked like they'd been married for ages and could finish each other's sentences. The man was dressed in a white toga-like outfit and looked sort of distinguished; his wife was somewhat diminutive, but I imagined her to be the family matriarch. They actually seemed very sweet and I envied them their closeness. I sensed they were trying to place me in their frame of reference without being overly obvious about it and were somewhat flummoxed.

For some reason, the few Europeans in the airport seemed to be more easily categorized and didn't elicit as much curiosity. I had sensed this when we were boarding the plane for New Delhi in Newark. I was aware that the South Asians sensed that on some innate level there was something both familiar and unfamiliar about me, but they couldn't quite locate me. They were welcoming to me on the whole and I felt "protected" in a way that I couldn't quite articulate to myself. Was it wishful thinking on my part? I don't think so, but who knows. Maybe being around them made me feel closer to my dad who I had really been missing since he had passed away a year prior to my trip.

Maybe it was just that after years of feeling "different" I still felt different but in a good way. I felt different in a more accepted way and I realized how comforting that can be. That isn't to say that every experience or interaction I had in India was positive. People are people and just like anywhere else, some people can be really nice and some people can be somewhat hostile. I remember the auto rickshaw driver who asked me in an angry tone if I realized that $100 US equals 3,000 rupees on the way to driving me to the American Express currency exchange, as though I was solely responsible for that fact. I tried not to personalize his umbrage and to just accept that to him I represented a very wealthy country. Maybe people feel somewhat differently after the events of these past few weeks with our economy seeming to flatline; I'm really not sure. Then again, maybe not. Everything is relative, as they say.

What really surprised was the reverse culture shock I experienced after just 21 days in India. I remember how Newark airport seemed like a remote spaceship to me when we landed early in the morning. As we queued up to go through customs, everything felt sort of surreal to me. I could see the young South Asian family who had sat next to me on the 15-hour flight just up ahead of me in line joking with the customs official. The husband had told me that he worked for Continental and they lived in Newark. He had been seated in first class, but came back to help his wife take care of the little ones, because the baby was crying and the little boy was restless. Our paths had crossed for fifteen hours and now they were going on with their lives and I was traveling on to Chicago.

There's something about traveling that never fails to amaze me in how one get thrown together with other people for a compressed period of time and suddenly they're gone off in their world and you're off to your little corner of the globe.

I remember being somewhat touched when the customs official said "Welcome home" in a really kind manner after skimming through my documents and asking me what the nature of my trip had been. But what struck me was that everything looked so spanking new and polished and everyone looked so "white."

This "culture shock" continued for days even after I arrived home in the Chicago area. Everywhere I looked, the landscape appeared strange to me and so depopulated. I have to say that this period of assimilation really took by surprise. It was the one area of my trip that I hadn't researched :)

I found myself missing the feeling of proximity to other people - veritable strangers - and that also surprised me. Even though I had cable at the $5 a night lodge I stayed at, as well as at the hotel in New Delhi, there was no television at the ashram and we had to line up to use the pay phones and the Internet. Cell phones were banned, but people used them anyway in the dorms. Mine didn't work on the frequency in India so I got used to being "disconnected" so to speak. I actually have never had cable in the U.S. but upon returning home, American television just seemed so different to me for some reason. Even today, eight months later, I can't quite put my finger on the differences. After all, there are Indian versions of CNN and MSNBC in India along with Seinfeld, Friends and Sex in the City and myriad other channels beaming shows from local Indian television, national Indian television and on and on. I remember seeing one show late at night when I couldn't fall asleep that was beamed from a Gulf state. Men with beards were walking on fire and there were camel races. It looked like something out of Lawrence of Arabia/.

Everything just felt so strange. It's the one thing you don't hear about when researching a trip to India is that when you return home you feel like a foreigner in your own land :)