I was talking to a Doctor the other day. I was talking to my friend and generally we were discussing being healthy, exercising etc.. That’s what normally everyone talks after having a beer or two and some pushing some tasty fried food down the throat. Well at least that what “most of the people I know” do it any way.
One of the guys said he is exercising regularly but still he hasn’t seen any difference in his muscle tone. So the Doctor friend who was curiously listening and who himself is quite a well-built, asked my friend about how he exercises. One of the question he asked was quite interesting. His question was “Do you ever get sour after exercising?” To that my friend responded, “Ah! No… I don’t want to get in to wrestling or body building”.
My Doctor friend asked him quite a simple question. He said, that when he was studying medicine he had to study a lot and sometimes it was very stressful and it was a lot of hard work. He said, I am sure everyone who gains had to take pains.
So, wouldn’t that be true with businesses and organizations as well. If the businesses and organizations don’t extend themselves beyond their comfort zone, there wouldn’t be pain and therefore there wouldn’t be gain.
Well…. does it therefore mean that if you have only fun, you wouldn’t gain as much? Well then it goes contrary to the belief of our Foundation!
Not really…. but let me talk about it in my next post!
It’s true they say, “Colder the weather is, warmer the people are!” And Fargo is “people” for me, then & now and forever.
It’s almost 19 years since the day I landed in Fargo ND. Even after two decades I still remember my 1st day. The very first impression was, “I can’t breathe here”. Well, in my home town in India you can actually feel you are breathing. The air has volume there. It’s thick with all extra nutrients (?) such as carbon particles, garbage molecules, all kinds of pollutants. So you feel the air. In Fargo, I couldn’t tell if there was anything going inside my lungs or not. That was my first surprise; of course, I was going to get many more during my twelve of years here.
It
was kind of spring when Fargo & I met each other. Sorry… I should explain.
Fargo is not a town. For anyone else Fargo may just be a city, for me Fargo is
an entity. It has a soul and has a character that only a few can realize.
When I decided to take a job in US, I applied to only 2 advertisements. And a company in Fargo offered me a job. Since I had done all my homework about the job profile, there wasn’t a question of not taking it. I was never worried about the money, so pay was not the consideration, the people who interviewed me were very friendly and there was a mutual comfortable feeling. But still I wanted to consult a couple people I knew who were in US for some time. I called one of them and he said he has never heard of Fargo and he was asking me where it was. Next, I called my wife’s cousin. He was in US for quite some time so I knew that he would know about Fargo and he did. But after talking to him I wished I didn’t. His description of Fargo reminded me of Dante’s Inferno. It scared me, shook me, demoralized me, did every mental damage that it possibly could (sorry for a little exaggeration on my part). “I didn’t know you disliked me that much”, I jokingly told him this years later when he visited us in Fargo. His opinion about Fargo had changed then. Of course it was his dear little sister living there.
Anyways,
this all was weighing on me when I came to Fargo. May be that made the
experience more pleasant.
When
I stared working & got to know people inside office & outside (mostly
other Indians who had moved there several years ago); invariably our
conversation would start with a smirky smile & a curios question, “How did
you come HERE?” They used to wonder; out of all the cities in US, why someone
would choose Fargo to come to work & that too straight from Mumbai.
Although
the question bothered me initially, I realized that they wanted to know how
come Fargo is so famous!
Then
they would usually move on to ask me how’s the climate in my home town? (19
years ago, Fargo hardly knew anyone beyond neighboring Canada & a few
adjacent states such as Minnesota, South Dakota, Montana & that’s all)
I remember a story I heard from a friend; who was a CT surgeon at the local hospital in Fargo. One of his patients had asked him where he was from and when he told that patient that he was from India, the patient had asked him which state (of US) was it in. Fargo was very ignorant about rest of the world then.
It used to be like a child that was self-engrossed and experiencing tranquility. And why shouldn’t it? Fargo was a self-sufficient, neat little town. Like a small baby tucked in baby cloths by a mom after bathing.
Fargo
always had a calm stature. In spite of the bad publicity it got due to extreme
cold and the movie “Fargo”, it always had a warmth in its air.
To me, Fargo was, at times, like a moody grandpa. Who on colder wintery nights would sit around a dimly lit fireplace and lost in thoughts of good old days! No worries, not too much excitement; just serenity. On the contrary in spring the same Grandpa would literally spring up to a buzzing day & night work and sandbagging to save its character from the two flooding rivers. The Red River of The North & Wild Rice. Both rivers were very special. Red is the one of only two rivers in the world that flows from South to North. Wild Rice was mellow & tasteless like rice but would show its colors only in spring. Like the presence of rice you feel while eating Biryani.
Fargo,
in those days, had another habit. It would embrace anyone easily. When I moved
there and started a small Indian community festival, Fargo helped me grow it
from a few to hundreds.
Only once had I seen Fargo really angry! Only once. But it was quite understandable. It was when a North Dakotan girl was kidnapped from a mall in a nearby city, raped & murdered brutally. Fargo was upset, it was angry. And for months it weighed on its mind. I know during the wintery nights, it would also shed some tears. Both Fargo & I used to.
My
love for Fargo from the day I landed to the date today hasn’t gone down. Its
been 7 years now that Fargo & I continued our long-distance relationship.
I didn’t grow up in Fargo but I did see Fargo grow up spells & bounds. Not just it developed itself, it developed my wife & I and also simple, naive people like us. I saw my son grow up & move out to college. I bought my first car, my first house with Fargo looking over my shoulders. When I made mistakes, it took me in its arms & consoled me. When I wept in pain, Fargo did too. When times were tough, Fargo stood behind me as a rock.
The years have passed and stress has grown, life’s lessons are hard to accept at times but then I look back and call Fargo in my memory. It still responds. An assuring aura is felt instantly. It calms me down mentally; however, it wells up my eyes.
Fargo, no doubt is the coldest city I came across but that’s what made me fall in love with it.
Because…..
It’s
true they say, “Colder the weather is, warmer the people are!”
And Fargo is “people” for me, then, now and forever.
My wife is a vegetarian. She has never eaten any kind of meat but she is okay with eggs. My East Indian friend calls himself a pure vegetarian but eats fish. My grandma was vegetarian too but I was told (by my mom) that she once fainted at the sight of eggs in our fridge. My South Indian friend is a staunch vegetarian but he doesn’t even eat ginger & onion let alone egg or fish or meat.
So
now having come from such a diverse (?) culture anything that I see or hear
shouldn’t really surprise me, right? That’s what I thought too but reality was
going to be different.
Several years ago; I used to take my son to McDonalds on every Sunday morning while my wife used to stay home. She never liked the smell there and had nothing other than fries to eat there. She is a diet freak. In a way, I am very blessed (?) that everyone around me is some kind of freak. (My wife is a diet freak, my best friend is a green-earth freak, my brother is a ritual freak, my boss (then) was a process freak, my company is a metrics freak…. I am “Friends- The TV sitcom” freak.) Anyways, coming back on track. My son and I would die to eat at McDonalds. In those days of course. Lucky for us we didn’t continue that else I really would have died. That’s a different story though.
On that Sunday, at McDonalds, we decided to take the food home and eat. I don’t remember what the occasion was. So, I thought maybe my wife would enjoy something too, meaning in addition to smelling (not eating) fries. I looked at the list and saw cheese burger. I called my wife and told her not to cook anything that we were getting MacFood and plan was to eat while watching a movie. I ordered cheese burger for her, my son I & got our usual crispy chicken & chicken nuggets and went home. Once settled down, my wife opened her pack & she cried out loud. First, I thought; I must have kept the lights in bathroom on. Well, that’s what I get to hear when I do that. But soon we found out that her cheese burger had beef in it. You can imagine how the rest of my married bachelor day would have gone. My son & I tried to explain that we seriously didn’t know or think that it contained beef but she thought we pulled a prank on her. I tried to tell her my logic. You order Chicken burger and you get a Chicken in it. So, you order cheese burger, shouldn’t you expect to have cheese in it? She was beyond understanding any logic that day. Well unfortunately I couldn’t disappoint the food, so I had to eat it. (By the way not that I eat beef but I liked the cheese burger that day. That was of course my first & last cheese burger).
It
is a profound question for me that what is veg and what is non-veg! Isn’t it
simple that what is a plant-based food should be veg and what is an animal
product should be non-veg but then how come milk & yogurt is veg? And how
come for my South Indian friend onion & ginger are non-veg?
I decided to explore this well-traveled path and well-debated time less question of ages once again. I decided to interview people. Well that turned out to be not so good for me at all. I asked my wife, “you are a vegetarian so how come you can eat eggs but not chicken?” She gave a cruel look and said, “Do you see flesh & blood when you see egg?” Huh! her definition for non-veg was anything that has flesh and blood in it. Fair enough. I asked my East Indian friend, his answer was simple, have you heard a fish making sound? (Glad that at least dolphins would survive his voracious desire to eat any fish. He would even eat tadpoles. And of course he will say Dolphin is not a fish, it’s a mammal. This seemingly dumb friend becomes a great scientist when it comes to defending his food preference. Then I talked to my South Indian friend. He didn’t disappoint me either with his fallacy. According to him anything that causes a life to begin is a non-veg. Unfortunately, he forgot the seeds that we eat. He is a civil engineer so how would he understand vegetative reproduction? His biology in college was limited to human anatomy only. And that to only specific good-looking humans.
During my first year being a North Dakotan, I went Deer hunting (it was just Deer pushing for me) with a colleague of mine. My friend and his family met me at a remote town in North Dakota. My wife had made lunch rolls with Indian flat breads enough for 4 of us. After we got our first kill, a nice grown up buck, we took a break. We all were hungry after 3-4 hours of walk thru’ snow, dirt and grass. I took the vegi-rolls out of my sack and handed it to my friend, his brother & his dad. They all loved the mildly spicy rolls as they ate them with Deer blood on their hands.
I thought it was kind of barbaric. But that’s when it occurred to me, wouldn’t my wife be thinking the same way when I am eating chicken or my Granny who fainted at the sight of eggs in my mom’s fridge?
Well,
I had a whole 2 hour to drive back home & ponder over this question. As I
got home, a nice smell of fresh bread and spicy curry welcomed me. It was great
to eat the home cooked meal after a day’s worth of hard labor.
When
you have the food you like and get to eat it with someone you love, does it
really matter what veg or non-veg is?
Most of the Indians are like me. Well, you may blame me for being a stereo type but I believe it’s true. We all think that we speak English. Well, while it’s true that we speak English but the English we speak and the English that’s spoken in the US is quite different. Firstly, there are slangs, then there is accent, if that’s not sufficient there is a whole new vocabulary that’s utterly confusing and lastly the spellings. Moreover, if you have migrated here and most likely you speak Queen’s English. It doesn’t matter if you came here 2 years ago or 20 years ago. Some things never change, I guess.
Just to give you an example, imagine you are in Fargo, ND and you are looking for a pair of jeans of a specific brand. (I have never understood why one pant is called a pair of pants but a shirt is not called pair of shirts) You walk in to a store and ask a sales person what you are looking for. Now at this time, assuming he/she understands what you are looking for, you are expecting a “yes” or a “no” or a “may be” as an answer. But what you actually hear in response is “You Betcha!” Now how in the world would you know that this means “YES”. (The capitalization & bold face is to show the utmost confidence in the answer).
So Indian English, as one of my ex-colleagues used to say, is Queen’s English. Obviously, we learned it from British and kept the same as our identity. English speaking skills of an Indian are known by the speed of the delivery and number of un-understandable(?) words he/she uses. Irrespective of whether we are communicating or not, the aim is to prove how good our English is, especially when you are in meetings or discussing worldly matters over scotch. With beer you typically don’t go beyond the neighborhood you live in.
Especially the nouns we use in India and the nouns we use here in America are very different. For example, when I bought my first car in US, I had to unlearn and relearn names of several parts again. When I started driving and getting directions from my friends (American friends), I did have to learn a new Geo-Dictionary as well. What we call stop-light here in US is called a “Signal” in India. I had a tough time understanding the concept of “yield”. In a city in India that I came from, Pune, there is no such concept of yield. Normally it takes an hour for six miles there (depending on time of the day), so if we keep “yielding”, we may never reach the destination. There will actually be a traffic jam… sorry traffic clog… like a drain clog. Traffic jam in Pune means traffic is flowing at an average speed. Everyone will only be “yielding” everyone.
I really like British accent but it’s hard to
understand, at least for me. I had no problem understanding most of the American
accent but that was while watching movies so you could always turn to someone
to verify what’s going on if you couldn’t follow. But the problem starts at cash
registers. Cash registers in department stores are not movies. I invariably had
trouble there. Say you are at the cash register in a grocery store and the lady
is scanning each item and passing it on to a bagger. The bagger asks you
something. All you understand in that
sentence is “OK?” So you are naturally going to say “Okay”! Onetime I
forgot I was in the US and nodded and the bagger looked confused he asked me
again. Indians (especially new comers) are the creatures with extremely
flexible necks. Any ways, you say okay and the life is good. But what happens
when you have a “go-green” freak with you?
Well what happens is that you look like an
idiot. Well, I had a friend from Chicago visiting the great prairie in Fargo
and we went grocery shopping. The bagger, as usual, asked me “something ok?”
And the “go-green” freak with me said not-ok. Huh! What’s wrong with him? I
told the bagger that he is visiting here for the first time and he is okay. But
the freak opens his mouth again and says “paper”. The bagger says “you
betcha!” What in the world was that?
On that day I leaned what I had missed out for last several months. As it
turned out that the bagger used to ask me “Is plastic okay?” As they say learning has no age limit, I will
say it has no place restriction either. By the way when I told this to my wife
that this is what we were missing out, she promptly said (and in front of the
freak) that it was not “we”. She had
become American within a week or two of her arrival while I was only physically
here even after several months.
The vocabulary creates tremendous funny situations.
I was trying to teach my son how a light-bulb works and so
I wanted to build a small battery-operated device with a switch. We wanted to
buy a light-bulb, batteries, wire and a switch.
We went to Menards. (Later on, I discovered RadioShack. My
joy that time could only be compared to Columbus’s when he found America) Not
knowing where to find these components, we decided to ask a sales person. Here
is how it went –
I: “Excuse me!”
He: “Howdy? What can I do for you?”
I: “(Howdy?). Umm… I am looking for a bulb.”
That’s what we call a light-bulb as In India.
He: “Ah! You need go through the double
door on the east. That’s where we carry them.”
He told me as if I was asking for directions to Washington Monument. We went through the double door and garden supplies. (I didn’t know what a double door was but we found a door that was twice the size of normal door). I promptly asked for a bulb. And I was directed to an onion or beat root looking thing. I wasn’t sure how would I connect a battery to it. I asked another sales person that I was looking for a “bulb” and not a root. She was confused and said that’s all they had.
We marched back to the earlier sales person. Again we start….
Me: “Excuse me!”
Him: “Yup!” Came out a very crisp sound.
Me: “I couldn’t find bulb.”
I could see he was clueless. Within few minutes, he had
forgotten that he had told me to go to garden supplies for bulb. After I
explained to him, he remembered.
Him: “Didn’t they have bulbs there?”
Me: “Yes, yes, …But no!” (A typical rest
less puzzled Indian) “I am looking for different bulbs. The one we get light
from.”
Him: “Ooooooohhhh! You need a light bulb. Well go to electrical section.”
That “Ooohhh” was lot better sounding than his crisp yup was. On we went again. Now to electrical section. We found it and found several light-bulbs too. But I was looking for a small battery operated one so I found another sales person.
Me: “Excuse me!”
Her: “Uh huh!” She said without even
looking at me.
Me: “I am looking for a light-bulb.”
I improvised.
Her: “Yep!Here they are!” Signing me to follow her and bring me to the stack of light-bulbs we had already seen.
Me: “No madam, I am looking for a small
one.”
She showed me a small one.
Me: “I need smaller”. I could have
easily said I need a 3V light-bulb. As I said I knew how to speak English and
not necessarily know how to communicate with it.
Her: “That’s all we got.”
Thinking that they might be getting smaller light-bulbs
soon, I asked.
Me: “So, when are you getting smaller?” Meant
to ask when is the store going to get next shipment of smaller light-bulbs.Her: “Sorry?”
a
Lucky for me that she didn’t understand the question. As
what was asked about light bulb could easily have been considered as a personal
question about her size.
At this point I gave up. But fortunately, another sales
person came to her rescue and she asked if he could help me and she excused
herself.
I repeated the whole story to this guy and he realized my “communication”
problem and asked me to describe it.
Me: “It’s
a small one typically they use it in torches.” Now that’s what we call a
flashlight in India.
Her: “Ah there you are! You need a torch”.
She said joyously. I said to myself, what difference does it make? I will buy the torch and remove the bulb for the demo to my son and put it back again. I needed to buy a torch anyway so let’s do it today.
We went to a section where there was oil
and long sticks and lighter fluid. He took out a stick with a wick on it and
said “Here you go. That’s a torch you are looking for!”.
Well, I didn’t know what to say so my wife
came to my help. She asked the sales girl that we are looking for a battery. In
India a battery is also a flash-light.
Now this girl too was confused but she brought us to yet another section and showed us batteries. Now in India we called them cells, so I told her, I was not looking for cells. She told me they don’t carry cells and these are batteries. It was a situation for yet another Britain-America war but luckily was defused quickly by my son saying he was hungry and he needed to go to McDonalds.
Well so we ended up buying nothing and I wasn’t
able to teach him the battery-operated light-bulb device. Lucky for him as my
efforts to turn on his Engineering gene failed by not being able to describe a
light-bulb. Later on, he went on to study medicine and becoming a doctor.
I still wonder what would have happened to him if we had
found a right light-bulb then.
One of the biggest problems I had adjusting in US, was cooking. Now generally I was a good cook back in India. But that was on a gas stove. Here in my apartment we had an electric stove. Not that I didn’t know this technology existed but full cooking on this electric stove? This was something I had never done, neither I thought it was a good idea. Of course, there was a reason for it. What do you do when you lose the power for a day; like on the day of load shedding? I explained the problem to Kartheek & asked him about the ‘load shedding day’. “Do people eat in restaurant that day?” I asked. Kartheek simply looked at me. I was going to learn this type of look from him & others on similar questions were a way to express all their emotions together. Dismay, anger, frustration and god knows which all emotions one can have to show pity on others.
First, he didn’t remember what load shedding was then why one needs to have it to eat in restaurant! But after I explained it to him that in India, we still have a chronic power shortage, so we shut the power off in different areas on different days… at least theoretically. I am talking about a situation 18 years ago. It is much better now. My town in India had load shedding any (and all) day of the week. After my explanation, he went on to a completely different track. He started discussing world matters and how political situation in India needs to change and how they can rectify these problems etc…. I was wondering why wouldn’t Kartheek go back and take over political parties? And more over why isn’t he answering my simple question? Anyways, all I learned though this was, that you hardly lose electricity in US and so I didn’t have to plan anything special for eating out. (By the way, Kartheek wasn’t correct. During my stay in the apartment the power went out 3 times in 3 years and not only did I have to eat out, I couldn’t even take a shower).
So, on the 1st day my roommate, Devendra, and I decided to make some tea. Devendra, another Indian guy who had joined me here and was staying with me while both of us were awaiting our families to join us from India. Tea, we thought was the simplest thing that any human being, at least an Indian human being, can make. Back home it wasn’t even considered cooking. In India any 2-year-old can make tea….well sort of. Here we were experienced electrical engineers and I boasted myself “a cook” so it was much less of an issue. So we thought.
We got the water boiling and had
concoction made and added milk. As the milk started rising normally, I reduced
the power but unfortunately the milk didn’t realize it and kept rising……and
…… for next one hour we both smelled like burned corpses… needless to say
we had to go eat outside. Till date I hate electric stoves.
After a couple days of practice, I became friends with the stove. At least it seemed that way. Making tea was actually a sort of game that I enjoyed playing. So, on one weekend we decided to make authentic Indian snack with tea. What else other than “Pakora” could I think of! Well for my American readers, I want to explain Pakora. It’s a fried food. It tastes exactly like onion rings except it’s a little more spicy. Normally eaten with green chili, so, the Pakora-Chilly combo tastes like Onion Rings on fire and as you eat it, it sets your mouth, esophagus, digestive track on fire for next 12 hours unless you are used to it. Most Indians are used to some amount of chilly be it red or green. Some of the Indians don’t even consider the chilly as “a chilly” unless it’s more than 500,000 on Scoville range. Well! I am not that Indian.
So, we got the oil in pan and heated it to it’s boiling point and we started frying. The 1st batch of pakoras came out nice, evenly brown, crispy and very tasty. Both Devendra and I couldn’t contain our joy and finished the 1st batch. The problem happened after this. We spent a little too much time in praising our own creation while the stove kept on heating the oil. We started with the next batch……And then…. it happened. Instead of normal frying; the pakoras caught on fire… well almost. The smoke started oozing out of the pan and we couldn’t even see each other for a few seconds. Quickly it filled the whole room and … oh my god!!! We started hearing sound of 100 railway engines blowing the horns in our kitchen. We had never heard the fire alarms before (as both of us didn’t have fire alarms in our houses back home and in those days it wasn’t so common) and by the time we were able to grasp what’s happening, there was a knock on the door and the building manager Mr. David asked us to get outside.
Although we had panicked, we turned everything off and ran outside… the whole building had become railway engines blowing horns & vomiting smoke. There were several residents gathered outside. We casually joined them and waited… like everyone except we didn’t know what we were waiting for. After a short while a long red truck appeared. Now Devendra & I were horrified. We thought we were in deep trouble. Everyone else seemed to be calm while we were trembling inside our pants that no one knew… and even if they had come to know about it, they would have thought we were cold. The firemen quickly alighted themselves and went inside the building. After 15 mins a fireman came out & said everything was okay. He talked to the building manager and we knew they had identified the source of the trouble when the manager, Mr. David, called us. I thought, well now it’s over. We are going back home next day. I was thinking how would I explain it to my wife that they deported me because I was making pakoras in US. As it is, she always disapproved my Extreme love for food & cooking.
As we approached Mr. David & the huge fireman; I was almost ready to hear…go home you idiot. Well, instead I heard the fireman saying “Sorry guys”. My eyes were popping out, I wasn’t sure what I was hearing, so I looked at Devendra and he was also looking like he had seen a ghost. The fireman again apologized and explained that how the fire alarm was mounted close to kitchen stove and how in winter we couldn’t open the windows so how the smoke could have triggered it…. and then he said “Well hope it didn’t spoil your food!” What!!! I was worried about booking my plane ticket home and this guys was worried about my snacks getting spoiled. I felt like hugging him and Mr. David & the whole fire department including the fire truck. Since that time, I have had some sporadic malfunctions with cooking but it never escalated to this level. A wise boss in India had once told me, it’s okay to be dumb, stupid or even plain idiot as long as you don’t make same mistake twice. The rest of that winter I came close to dying of hypothermia while cooking but we never had to call fire truck.
Not sure what you would think of me after this but I am sure my boss would be happy. God bless his soul in heaven.
My experience of trying to buy a car with Queens English in US.
The America I came across was completely unrecognizable compared to what I had imagined. The humans all looked the same except they were far fairer than what I had expected, though there was another problem. They didn’t speak English! Well, let me explain. The English that Indians learn to speak is Queen’s English and the one Americans speak is…American English. Although the “colour” of sky is blue everywhere; here in US the sky has blue “color.” Well! It caused a lot of embarrassment…not for me but people who tried to introduce me to the American culture that you will eventually find out in my other encounters.
My boss, Kartheek, took me to a restaurant the day I joined…the waitress came and asked something. (FYI- Kartheek was here for over 25 years & married to an American girl. At least he remembered India was Bharat. Kartheek was my litmus test for testing my American language skills or my adoption of American culture… in a way.) First, I thought she was stammering, but then I saw Kartheek was also stammering. That was a clue for me that something was being said and also understood & responded to. I was never more ashamed of myself than this. My mom was an English teacher, and I had topped the school in English, but I couldn’t even understand the stammering business let alone speak.
The lady went away and came back stammering again. I had a
very sober or what you call clueless smile on my face. She stammered again. Ah!
I was very intensely listening as if my life depended on it. I thought she was
asking about my pop. Well why is she asking about my dad? Again, clueless smile
appeared on my face. Here the seasoned Indian came to help and said she was
asking if I needed a drink. Pop is a drink?! This was beyond my comprehension.
Well a few months later I went to Charlotte, NC and very confidently ordered
pop and the waitress said, “sorry?” Turned out, here they called it soda not
pop. Indeed, the America in my book was different.
People here also think of India in the same way. One day I was talking to the janitor of our building, and he asked me a simple question. I almost died hearing his question.
He was asking if I went to school on a horse or on an elephant. Damn National Geographic. This was just a preview though, I was to get more of this later.
Obviously, March in North Dakota those
days (before global warming I mean) used to be quite cold. I was told that if I
preferred not to die of hypothermia then I better buy a car. Of course, I
hadn’t yet given up, so I started shopping for a “used car.” In India we called
it a “second hand car.” But I had discarded that phrase long back when even
Kartheek, the seasoned Indian boss, didn’t understand what I was saying.
So, I went to look for a used car. This time I took a colleague of mine with me who was my neighbor in apartment complex and also from neighboring county, Pakistan. My problem is like a quantum particle physicist. I easily find what I look for. The very first car I saw, I liked. But then it was Azam, the Pakistani friend of mine, who advised me not to buy it. He was talking about how the hood was damaged and the trunk had a hole in it and asking the owner if it had block heater, etc. What the heck was that? We did have a car in India but none of them had the parts Azam was asking about. So, I thought I could just go along for the time being.
I lost my first car, but on we went to the next one. This was an odd-looking Toyota. They called it a hatch back. It had only two doors and you had to fold the front seat to get in or out. Again, my love affair started. This time I wasn’t going to listen to Azam, but thankfully he too liked it, except for the fact that it had a big hole in the bumper. But I didn’t care, so we bought it and brought it home. Actually, Azam drove us back. This was my first big purchase in my dreamland.
After we came home, I could no longer
contain my curiosity. As a student asks his master, as polite as I could be, I
asked Azam. What’s the hood and the trunk? And what heater he was talking
about!
Now it was Azam’s turn to have a clueless smiley face. He must have wondered in an awe. And then went on to explain, what the hood and truck were. Oh! I said, we called it “Bonnet” and “Dicky”. So, the Queen’s English word Bonnet became Hood here and Dicky became Trunk. I was to learn later that the stepony has also become spare-tire and a puncture had become flat tire. I had just realized I had to un-learn and re-learn every thing about the car, starting with the vocabulary. I had embarked on my encounters with cars in general and next was to come very soon when I took it to a mechanic and then driving. (FYI – I later found out that an Indian boy Sameer had also became Sam in US). Slowly America was having an encounter with me.
This is a story of a young boy who grew up reading about America and dreaming about visiting it one day.
As any curious young kid in India in those days, I would read anything that I could lay my hands on. I always used to feast on an array of books for free because my dad was on the University book selection committee & was a chairperson at the local public library. Going to the library in those days was like having any smart phone with Wi-Fi except you didn’t have to pay through your nose. Mom yelling at me, to keep the books aside & study, was the same though. I think moms are timeless universal beings irrespective of any parameters. Kids are their precious treasures yet they seldom mind letting that little treasure mind its own business.
One day my dad received a big parcel by mail (we used to call it post then and we used to have postmen) and I was told to open it. As a carnivore jumps on its prey, I clawed away the wrapper and found 5 copies of a book with a cover showing a picture of a bearded man in a lawyer type of coat. The book was heavy with about 400-500 pages and, to date, I still remember the soft silky touch and smell of the new book. Although the picture of the person was unrecognizable; the glossy colorful cover and the title of the book was very inviting. The title read “An Outline of American History”. Of course, it was translated into my mother tongue. Later I was to realize that the picture was of Abraham Lincoln the 16th President of the United States of America.
Those
were the days of space age and quantum mechanics. From the TV serial of Fire
Ball to the day-to-day discoveries of quantum particles to the imaginative
science fictions based on alien visits and encounters were some of the musts of
the everyday news items. America was my hero, landing the 1st man on the moon.
Several years later when I saw a conspiracy theory video on Fox, “How the Moon
Landing was Fake!”, I couldn’t contain my dismay, but that’s a separate story
and it almost costed me a couple stitches to my fist. Hardwood floors don’t
appreciate when you punch them.
Anyways, this book started out with the May Flower and went all the way to show classy pictures of metal cutting laser beams and Boeing 747. For a nerdy kid like me this book was the feast of a multi course dinner on an empty stomach. I can’t remember how many times I had seen the pictures of the great personalities in that book and read the captions underneath. There was a picture of Charles Lindberg with his plane, then there was General Eisenhower, and also a picture of Mt. Rushmore. It never occurred to me then that I would be visiting it several times in the future. There were pictures of Eskimos and pictures of whale hunting. After I arrived here, I didn’t see Eskimos; though I did almost live like one for 12 years in North Dakota. For a person coming from Mumbai, Fargo was nothing less than an igloo in winter.
When I read this book for the first time, I was just browsing through it and registering pictures and captions of interest in my mind, so I could come back later and read it in detail. That was one of the tricks I had learned from my grandfather. Not how to read a book but how to buy fresh of the fresh grocery at the farmers’ market. He used to take me around and just stroll through it all over without buying anything but just checking the prices. Then the second round was stopping at places where he thought there would be a chance of negotiation. Then after wasting an eternity, he would buy one item and move on to his next prey. I never adopted that style for shopping but did use a similar approach for a thick book with pictures. And it paid off. Within a few scans over the hour I earned my first Ph. D. in American history…of course only among my friends who just knew ‘A’ for America.
This
book, however, helped me immensely. Those pictures triggered my curiosity to
read and explore more. A small kid in the rural in-skirts of India was talking
about the American legends, inventions and started sleeping with dreams of a
land that he would one day visit. That was my first encounter with America.
c
It’s nice to be able to write. Well…. it would be nicer to have someone read it. We at OREXIAN FOUNDATION let our imagination wander and share what we can. So welcome expressing yourself in the areas of Fictions…. Science Fictions or otherwise or just share your life experiences with us.
