Well... time really flies! Today, I completed my 1st year of stay in the US. I remember how in my first job, me and my friends used to count the days leading to completion of the first year! After the first year, the excitement vanished and the 'anniversary' day just became another day. Perhaps the same will be the case this time too.
While going through my old e-mails, I stumbled across an old e-mail that I had written exactly a year back to my dad. It was written during the first week of my stay in US and the registration formalities were going on in the college. I had written to dad about the new country, new faces, new culture and new food. I had been a bit frustrated because all I saw everywhere were either Burgers or Salads! I was eating all sorts of foods with weird names which made no sense to me. And to add to the potpourri of experience, people's accent seemed strange. Why would anybody pronounce simple words in such complicated ways that required an inexperienced poor soul to relax his facial muscles every now and then! It's altogether a different matter that virtually everybody on street you made eye contact with, greeted you. So I had to greet everybody back and that in itself was a herculean task. Ultimately I had to resort to looking at the road while walking! I kept on thinking about the same thing happening in India. Try greeting everybody you meet on the street and you will never reach your destination. You will either spend a good deal of your time greeting strangers (not to mention the strange looks that you will get from them!! and they would even keep a safe distance from you because of this strange behavior) or you will need a doctors attention because in your enthusiasm, you greeted a lady who did not take the greetings in the right spirit and raised a ruckus and you were at the receiving end!
But, we are not in India and in this new country, this is what people do, so this is what I'll have to learn. So here we were, building a greeting stamina and also at the same time noticing the in-difference that was a part of the greeting. "Hello! How are you doing today?" is as casual a remark as brushing your teeth! I noticed that people do it more out of a habit rather than a genuine concern. Some even asked me how I was doing and went away, leaving me speaking to myself. So, after some of these strange encounters, I gathered that I should just say 'Good' and move on. It took my some time to say 'good' quickly so that it was spoken before the person left.
Ok. So greetings over and now is the time for some 'Thankya'. What is that?, you ask. Well, that my friend, took me some time to figure out and finally after some pattern matching and context specific investigations, resembled "Thank you". I don't blame this adaptation of the good old two words. It soon became clear to me that this was also a victim of the excess like the "How are you doing?" mentioned earlier. Infact, the answer to this question should ideally have a "Thankya" at the end. Gosh! now I had to fit this with the 'Good' too !! As if life was less complicated with just the 'good' ! Anyways, another thing to learn...
One thing that changed for me after reaching US, was the definition of BIG. Starting with cars, I felt Honda CRV was big, luxury car but on the roads here it seemed like a middle segment 'also available' car. There was (and still is) something here that makes burgers real big, a glass of coke - HUGE, trucks/macks - Giants and Interstates - WIDE. I won't go into details about the content of cheese in the burgers which made the consumer beat the XXL size.
Here I was in a country, where you end up spending the equivalent of 1000 Rupees on just a week's groceries, where an electrician probably makes more money than the software professional (if he charges 400$ just to "look" inside the meter-box, I don't see why he won't be earning more than the software guy), a place where a carpenter and plumber can change professions and become dentists (not a bad choice I must say! Instead of wood and Stainless Steel rods, they just need to deal with some flimsy calcium structures. That too, just 32 of them at max!).
Infact, the dental treatment is so expensive that flying to India, getting ALL your teeth removed, and flying back to US might be a cheaper option. But I was prepared for this and had my teeth double checked before coming. What I wasn't prepared though was the condition in my health insurance which stated that in general it did not cover Dental treatment costs. The only situation it covered was when my wisdom tooth would break and half of it would be inside my gums and it required an extraction. At that time, my insurance company will graciously refund me my dental expenses. Well... Something is better than nothing.. and I can use this as an excuse to visit India.
Speaking of dental health, one more thing comes to my mind. If your lips are dry and they crack, you might have skin cancer and it might be a good idea to count your days because that's what you will find if you do a quick US google search (results vary according to geographic location of the search) with most of your symptoms. You are either terminally ill or should have been dead by now. Ok, google might be a defaulter in this case. So we go and see a doctor because we are sneezing and the first question he asks is - "Did you get the flu shot?" ... The WHAT ?? "Flu Shot"? You guessed it, vaccination against common cold. Sounds a bit strange, doesn't it? Coming from India, it sounded rather hilarious to me. Why would anybody feel the need to get vaccinated against common cold? Duh!! stupid question!! Obviously to prevent yourself from getting sick and loosing valuable productive hours in office. Yeah... but did anybody pay attention to the fact that the virus mutates very fast so you will have to get yourself vaccinated virtually daily? Oh well! Now that is a nice business strategy. Make a vaccine that needs to be taken frequently so the medicine companies atleast have a fixed source of income. To make profit or break even, they might make you take the TB medicine (especially if you are from Asian country and have an innocent cough once in a while and were naive enough to go to the Health Center) just in case you had TB (although you exhibit absolutely no symptoms). To make some more profit, they might do an x-ray of your stomach for a stomach pain instead of OR in addition to an ultrasound, when all you needed was just 'Pudinhara'.
And did you know, houses here have more cockroaches than there used to be in India. And why wouldn't there be more. When you make houses of wood, you are bound to have pesky little things running around. Why fear ? 'Pest Control' is here? All they do is put some useless sticky pads in the house with the hope that the cockroaches (and even rats!!) will walk over them and get stuck! If they did get caught like this, I must say they were a disgrace to the Roach/Rat community and didn't deserve to exist anyways. So here we have lots of sticky pads in the house and all they trap are the loose hair and dirt on the ground. Thanks Mr. Pest Control for helping me keep my house clean of loose hair and dirt but, the cockroach just tasted my cornflakes.
Oh ya, don't be surprised to hear a house blown away in the wind. When you make houses of wood instead of cement and concrete, you cannot expect it to hold ground.
So, as you set your foot on this $$$$$ land, let me welcome you to a country where 30 minutes of power outage is enough to raise a national alarm, drought is declared even when lakes are full of water and taps never run dry, water-fountains (that's a word I had to learn when I was dying of thirst) aim water at your face and you have to suck water while most of it runs down the drain, and inspite of so much water wastage, wiping is preferred over washing and 'Z' is ZEEEEEEE while the digit Zero is often called 'O' (alphabet O).
What am I still doing here inspite of all these things? Well.. Every place has its own pros and cons and there are lots of pros (seriouly there are.. doing Research (MS/PhD) being one of them)... But right now, I don't feel like writing down the pros. I'll leave that for some other day. Or better still, come experience it... the land of $$$$ awaits you. (Or should I take off a couple of $$ in respect of the crumbling US economy and global slowdown).
- Shandon, Jandan, Shanon, Chhhaaa .. WHAT??, Chan Dan, Dyaasgyooptaa, CD
(sorry.. these are not multiple authors but US variants of my sweet name/surname that I have had to listen to till now)
