States Side: Still a Foreigner
They call it reverse culture shock. For me it feels like this: I am freezing. I wear a sweatshirt everywhere I go. I have a new sense of indignation about the amount of energy Americans use. It is ridiculous. People have central air–for my Indian brothers and sisters that is hug A/C units that keep the whole house/ building cool. Often people set the temperature at 70-74 degrees Fahrenheit which is 21-24 degrees Celsius.
The fact that everyone here owns a car–like four per family if there are four people over 16 years old–seems strange. The sizes of the houses, the amount of stuff in the houses, and vastness of options at the grosery store seem a bit overwhelming.
I thought that maybe new styles of clothes might stand out to me, but the newer trends seem to be the GPS, and the vegetable garden. Everyone seems to have a small GPS called a tom-tom. You enter the address you are going and an automated voice directs you when to turn as the screen shows a car winding long a digital map. The voice can be very bossy, after one half mile turn left, turn left, stay left. It is generally accurate but occasionally might lead you to an empty parking-lot. I like the idea of not getting lost in an unfamiliar city, but I’m not sure about this kind of dependence on technology. In Delhi, people just stop and ask people where to go. It’s much more relational that way.
The vegetable garden. This is a positive trend to be sure. Almost everyone I have stayed with has had a vegetable garden. I remember when my mom had a vegetable garden… the home owner’s association came and mowed it down.
Maybe somethings are changing for the good.
Commentary 1
As I was getting ready to leave Delhi. I started thinking about how I could begin to explain to friends in the states what my life there is like. I wanted to take pictures of everything I saw and try and capture my life on camera. But there are so many things that pictures can’t explain and not only that but I didn’t get around to taking all the pictures I imagined I would take. So below are a few pictures of the flat I stay in, my bed on the floor, my plastic toliet seat and shower that has no seperation or curtain defining it from the rest of the room, the redgate to our building, the presswalla kids that ring our door bell five times a day, a newspaper recycle man on a bicycle on the street below, and the porch we hang our laundry on and if by chance it is not over 100 degrees we sit on. But I would like to describe a few moving shots of everyday sights that will help you place where I am in coming from as I marvel in being back in the States but know that a piece of my heart remains on the otherside of the world.
That man on the bicycle is calling out in a loud and repetative tone, “PAPER, PAPER, PAPER.” Then a fruit vendor comes pulling his cart down the street calling out, “Carbusa, Alm, Liche, Carbusa, Alm, Liche,” (Watermelon, manago, Liche). A woman in a house dress comes out of her balcony and asks the man his rate after telling him how much she will pay she lowers a bucket down on a string. He puts what she asks for in the bucket but tells her to give his price. She insists on her price and lowers down her rupees. Next a man who is selling something in a basket on the back of a bike, but I haven’t figured out what comes down the road calling out his merchandise to a tune that is bound to get stuck in your head all day. I’ll video tape it one day. Though I am enjoying the piece of being in a place where vendors don’t call out loudly at 6 in the morning, I am confident that after a few months of being in the states I would miss it.
