Connecting to Desiness

During J's winter break, we were visiting with a friend of DB's whose wife recently had a baby. It is not often that we get five days of the immersive desi experience so it was almost like a trip to India minus the cost and the hassle. We had freshly cooked meals four times a day - both DB and I love to cook so we gladly pitched in. The mom-in-law caught her desi soaps on the living room TV and after the kids and grandma went to bed, we watched a Bollywood flick. This family is all set to return to India in the next couple of years - it has been their plan from the start. The amped up desi ambiance around the house is supposedly for the benefit of the kids who will find the transition easier. They socialize only with their kind to minimize the impacts of a culture that will soon become foreign to the children.

As we watched some of the ridiculous shows grandma is hooked on to, we could not help comparing them to some of  the entertainment Doordarshan provided in 80s and early 90s when there were no other options. They were infinitely more sensible and represented the India that we lived in. These folks go back every year and spend a few months in their home town - unlike DB and I, they have never grown strangers to India. It was interesting to see that they agreed with us. We would all love to see Indian television do something that spoke to us and our desi-ness. It certainly does not to me and many of my desi friends - maybe desi-ness as an idea and identity is in a state of flux right now. Until we are able to find our true voice, the popular media will sound cacophonous.

In the middle of all this, I decided to check out Aravind Adiga's Last Man in Tower and retired hurt. Past page thirty or so, I could no longer keep up with the burgeoning cast of characters. Adiga had pulled off an afternoon desi soap on the reader. The plot does not flow or expand on it's own merits but is padded and propped by characters and stories that contribute nothing to the denouement.

Our hosts recommended that we watch the movie Kaminey since neither DB or I had watched it before. We were advised to follow the plot closely because it was a complicated one. I am guessing the idea was to go for edgy, ironic and different - take done to death the twins separated at birth story and turn it on its head. Every few minutes there would be a part that was really nicely done -with that came an expectation of more and better to follow, but that did not seem to happen. The whole experience was like a roller coaster ride with frequent ups and downs. May have been fun for thirty minutes and under but intolerable for a full length movie.

Reading this story out censoring the sense out of American TV shows made me think about how our friends are preparing for their family's return to India. Maybe all of this is symptomatic of the state of confusion we are in as a people.

Spectator Sport

It was the summer vacation my last year at high school and I was in spending a few weeks at my Grandmother’s in Kolkata. On the evening which this post is about, my aunt and I were at Gariahat shopping. A young man who looked like a college student had been following us around for a while and then it happened. I was “eve-teased”. I told my aunt right away and she asked “Are you sure he did that ? He looks like a boy from a good family” and I replied “Yes. I am absolutely certain”.

She suggested that we give him another opportunity to be sure that I was right in my assessment of the "incident" and give us the chance to catch him in the act if I was. A few minutes later, we had reason to accost him, beat him with our bare hands with my aunt was livid enough to go at him with her umbrella berating him as she did for being a common lecher while pretending to be a student. He kept repeating “I’m sorry. I won't do it again”. As far as I could tell, he did not appear particularly contrite but was definitely taken aback by this unexpected attack by two women in a public place.

Soon enough, in true to form Kolkata fashion an audience had gathered around us in a circle. Several men suggested that we let him go because it was his first mistake – I was not sure how they could have known that to be the case.Yet other men said that he had been punished enough and we should stop now. But for the most part people (men and women) asked us “What happened ?” (clearly all that my aunt was saying in her rage to the man and his reaction to her accusations was not conveying the message clearly enough to our audience).

Some went as far as to wonder “Are you sure he really did something ?” or ask " How bad was it ?" (suggesting that us two women had recently exited a lunatic asylum and had got it into our deranged brains to beat up a random guy walking down the street minding his own business. If the lack of our mental faculties  was so painfully evident, they should have called the authorities to strait-jacket both of us to prevent further destruction of life and property. Instead they stood around watching and asking these questions).

Not one man or woman said anything in our support - let alone demonstrate it in any useful way. Some stayed in the side lines and bemoaned the state of society where a young girl duly accompanied by an aunt was not safe from the undesired attentions of street side Romeos. They were the first to walk away from the scene anxious not to get involved in any of it. It was clear they held both my aunt and I in very dim view - just the kind of women that Bengali "bhadralok" should steer clear off. Imagine causing such a racket over a small thing like "eve-teasing".

After a while both my aunt and I stopped from sheer mental and physical exhaustion. Anger and the public mockery that my humiliation had turned us into was enough to want us both to vanish without a trace. The young man got up, collected his text books that had fallen out of his bag. He walked away and so did we. The audience left with as much haste as they would exit a movie theater when the closing credits start to roll. I would imagine it had been a "paisa vasool tamasha" (spectacle worth the money) for all of them - and it didn't cost them anything.

When we got home, my Grandma flew into a panic fueled rage when she heard what had happened. She gave my aunt a mouthful for setting a bad example and behaving “like that” in public. What’s a young girl going to learn ? Next time a man does something to her (clearly this would hardly be the last time - she seemed confident of that at least), she’s going to try and beat him up and only bad things can result from that. Is that my aunt wanted to see happen to me ? Did she not know that women from respectable families did not call unpleasant attention to themselves in public ? I hated to see my feisty aunt, my hero be treated so unfairly but it was just not the time to argue with Grandma.

We had to deal with her withering statements disapproving of our conduct for a good hour before she finally stopped. She agreed it was hard to not become furious under the circumstances but should we not worry about not stirring up even more trouble. What if the guy had decided to strike back – he was over six feet tall and well built – what would we do then ? What if he had followed us home an decided to extract a revenge even more horrible ? No matter what there would always be crowd around us inquiring into the details of the incident and do nothing. Had we considered any of that ? Had my aunt taken leave of her senses ?

She decreed that for the rest of my stay at Kolkata I was to be accompanied by an uncle (if not both) each time I needed to go out somewhere. I asked my Grandma if she wanted enlist their friends as well – I could go out boldly with a dozen men forming a phalanx around me. Should I still get “eve-teased”, I had a better chance of fighting back. She was not in the least amused.

I did not fail to notice that my uncles (both my aunt's brothers and her husband) did not compliment her on her courage. They look just as concerned as my Grandma. I was disappointed to see that. Is that they best they could do - say nothing at all ? It took my some years to understand their predicament. They could not realistically take on all the bad guys that we would meet in the world outside a la Superman. With their limited resources, the best they could do is to keep us out of harm's way

To that end, they accompanied us whenever possible, ran errands for us when it was not considered "safe" for us to do so. Refused to let their teen-aged daughters to go out wearing clothes that some pervert on the street may find provocative - the list was endless. These are the men in families just like mine who believe they are doing their best to keep the women out of harm's way. While they mean well, they also enable the crippling cycle of fear, diffidence and dependence among women and there is a steep price to pay for all of it. That was my life growing up in India - a life that I have in common with most Indian women I know.

That incident has some of the most remarkable parallels to my experience writing a post (including the comments and emails it provoked) some time back about the lack of freedom for women in India and my hesitation to return there from America specially with a young daughter.Some of the  commenters reminded me of the audience that had gathered around my aunt and I at Gariahat many years ago.

They were those that convinced that I was over-reacting and nothing had really happened - India was not nearly as terrible for women as I made it out to be. Some were passers by with no desire to take sides one way or the other - it happens in India and around the world - maybe it is a little worse in India. No big deal. Yet others acted like men often do in India - go into full-throttle denial of the issue itself so they can continue to feel like "real" men. They focus on assembling a battery of evidence to show how India is no worse than any other country instead of being positive agents of change.

However, those closest to the subject - Indian women remained largely silent or vaguely dismissive. Their own experiences did not match mine though I was probably right and somewhat justified in my concerns and opinion on the subject. There was a welcome difference too - in the on-line world some were able to take a position on their own and stick with it - it was refreshing to see some solidarity from the sisters for a change. What I remember most vividly about that evening is the general attitude of the women in the audience – there was no sense of sister-hood with me (the victim) or my aunt (my defender). They mostly wanted to know the scoop – like it was some great mystery that only I could reveal unto them.

The subliminal message being that I had done something to cause this to happen and had it been them, the same man would have not reacted nearly the same way had it been them. Something was inherently wrong with me - what else do you expect with a firebrand aunt like that - and I was merely suffering the consequences of my less than satisfactory upbringing. They were so glad not to be at the receiving end of unwanted attention that they had forgotten that it could be their turn the very next moment.

None of them paused to think why it is that a man suspected of picking a pocket could  even get killed at the hands of a mob without any questions being asked but when it came to a woman being molested, a trial by fire was needed to prove she was justified in making the claim of harassment. It did not bother them that men could minimize or even deny what they had to go through when they had no right or business doing so. It did not strike them as ironic that they were participating in this kangaroo court proceeding alongside men - that they were their gender's worst enemy.

I had felt that evening, that the eve-teaser was probably a better man than any other male in the audience. He took the public beating and the abuses my aunt hurled at him without protest and left without a whimper. As much public sympathy he had with the men in the audience, he could have well used it to his advantage and tried to turn the crowd against us. Other than my aunt, not one woman assembled there to watch the tamasha felt the indignation a woman should - to realize that was as heartbreaking as it was frightening. As far as I was concerned my aunt was the only woman who had a woman's heart and soul.

When I wrote that earlier post, I was disappointed to see very few female readers come up and voice their opinion on that post. If that knot of people around the three of us in Kolkata was a petri dish in which to observe Indian society in a test environment, so was the post. While a lot of time has passed between the two events, fundamentally very little has changed. In a sense I was alone with a circle of spectators once again.The tragedy of the Indian woman is not about the men out to exploit, abuse and manipulate her when they find her in a vulnerable position, but it is the lack of solidarity with other women. We are a people divided against ourselves in more ways than can be counted but the price of women being divided between themselves in the face of so much social atrocity is possibly the highest.

In this country, every American woman (black and white) in my acquaintance who has been a single mother herself or knows someone who has been one has gone out of her way to help me in any way they possibly can. I have yet to see an exception to this rule. These are the women that made my life in my single parent days relatively simple. My experience in India had been the exact opposite - my marital status turned me into a social pariah almost instantly. Yes, there were exceptions to this rule but not nearly enough in number to make it a comfortable social existense for one such as myself. For this reason alone, I had been able to work it out for J and I so far away from family - far more comfortably than I was had been able to in India.

My friend A, who has spent half his life in Europe and America and the other half in India, wrote this to me back in the days when I was dithering between staying back in India to raise J with the support of family in surroundings I was familiar with and taking the plunge into the unknown in this country :

"America is country of second chances, there is no stigma attached to failure (and I mean in a social sense). You will find it very liberating in your situation and it may be worth all the trouble. India is a great place to live - people are warm and friendly but only as long as you don't "fail". Once you do, the facade falls off and you see people for who they really are. From what I can tell from talking to you, you are in a state of shock at the difference. Don't be. Accept it as a chance to find out who your "real" friends are. When you come here, you may have no friends at all but you will get by with the help and kindness of strangers".

It was good advise and I am glad I took it.

A lot has been written about the position of women in India and the endless list of impediments on their way forward. Much can be accomplished merely through cultivating a sense of sisterhood - you would think the experiences they have in the public space would make this easy. Class, social and economic status mean absolutely nothing to the average "eve-teaser". Every one is just a female gender - for better or worse that should facilitate a stronger sense of kinship between women but surprisingly enough it does not. 


That aunt is close to sixty now and on most days completely wiped out after babysitting her three grand-kids. My daughter will be a teenager soon and had I been back in Kolkata, I may have needed to do for her what my aunt once did for me - that is a sobering realization.

The Lost Girls

Read this Interesting observation on why the more affluent and educated families in India are more likely to have fewer daughters. This is something I had heard anecdotally from a friend in India who is involved in the production of social awareness documentaries. Whereas he just stated it as a matter of fact, here is an explanation of the phenomenon :

..wealthier and more educated women face this same imperative to have boys as uneducated poor women — but they have smaller families, thus increasing the felt urgency of each birth. In a family that expects to have seven children, the birth of a girl is a disappointment; in a family that anticipates only two or three children, it is a tragedy.

The article mentions advertisement for ultrasound in India “pay 5,000 rupees today and save 500,000 rupees tomorrow.” that I don't recall ever having seen - but it is entirely possible that they exist. The argument is therefore development in a country with deep seated gender bias and discrimination can actually hurt women instead of helping them. In conclusion the author says :

In the short and medium terms, the resulting clashes between modern capabilities and old prejudices can make some aspects of life worse before they make them better.

Sistas And Brethren

Several months ago, I met C a desi man in his early 40s. Since the acquaintance had come about through work, we knew little beyond the other's name and job function. One evening, I had to scuttle from a meeting to pick up J from after-school care. That was when C became aware I was a parent. Soon after he moved on to a different job. In the interim we became aware of each other's single parent status - his two boys lived with their mother.

As we were very clearly not each other's type it was easy for us to get over the initial discomfort that results from our martial status situation to become friendly acquaintances with somewhat  similar challenges. A few weeks into his new job, he called me one day to see if I was up for lunch midway between his workplace and mine. We chatted about work (his and mine) for a bit and then conversation drifted to kids and from there to ex-spouses.
 

This was the first time I was hearing about his divorce. He had married an Indian woman born and raised in the US. C came to America as a grad student and had met his wife at school. Two children later, their incompatibility turned so pronounced that the marriage had to end. According to my math, that is also the period of time is takes for one such as C married to an US citizen to acquire an US passport. Of course, I did not point that out and let C continue with his story.

Now, he is back in the marriage market and looking for someone "unencumbered" by kids as he put it. Not being comfortable with the idea of a blended family myself, I was able to understand that perspective - C boys are tweens. It would take a whole of adjustment on all sides for a blended situation to work out.  He added that it was also imperative that  they possessed a green card or were US citizens. I guessed he probably did not want a woman to do to him what he had done to his ex-wife. This was not the first time that I have known a man who married a local (desi or otherwise) for a passport and then dumped the wife on largely frivolous grounds. The same men became very wary of women who due to their legal status could stand to benefit from marrying them.

But the conversation got more interesting at this point. "You know what bothers me most, she never expressed any desire for reconciliation - you would think she'd at least try. We have two kids together. I felt like I was used and thrown". How so I asked because the narrative up to now had been she had not tried hard enough to meet his expectations from a wife and he finally ran out of patience. It did help that the citizenship was taken care of.

"Well, she has the kids. I am left with nothing". I had to restrain my impulse to say What about that passport ? Then C added "But I am confident she will not be able to pull this off . Raising two boys alone is no joke, she needs the father's support. At some point she will give up and reach out for help. I would have bought a house here but I am sure I will need to move back to Colorado to be around the kids. It's just a matter of time." This was when I finally had to say something.

"You know, C. I have raised J alone in this country without any family within a thousand mile radius. I am not born and raised here and my ex does not even live in America. It was challenging but I was still able to do it. I would not hold my breath on having your ex beg you for help. Your boys are older, she has a network of family and friends here and she has a good job. Her challenges would be nothing compared to mine. She will manage very well without your help. You have to realize that unlike in India, a woman in America does not need a man to survive. She can do everything alone and do it well - specially someone like your wife. As for your kids, they are old enough to understand who wronged whom and they will make their allegiance known quite plainly."

As much as I hated to break his ego inflated bubble, I thought I would be doing gross disservice to the woman in the equation by not giving her credit for having the chops to pull it off as a single parent. Though I don't know her, I felt a sense of sisterhood with her.

Toxic Parents

In this DNA article, Geetanjali Jhala covers a very important but rarely discussed facet of desi social life - that of adult children trying to cope with parents with whom they simply don't get along. Indeed, sometimes the coexistence is so stressful that it feels like a punishment  that has no end in sight. The protagonist in Jhala's article is a divorced woman in Mumbai who is unable to make a new relationship work out despite having every desire to do so. The real reason turns out to her difficult relationship with her father with whom she has moved in after her divorce.

Many people who seek help for dysfunctional behaviour find it hard to acknowledge that their parents may be the cause, and that the only remedy may be to move out or even cut themselves off completely."It's in the course of therapy that they realise the depth of their resentment towards their parents," says psychologist Varkha Chulani. "This is buried beneath layers of guilt, because we are culturally conditioned to believe that our parents are right; the moment a child questions his parents, he is looked upon as disrespectful, and is told to 'shut up'."

While dysfunctional parent-child relationships are universal, they hurt desis so much more because our of our cultural conditioning. We are expected to accept (indeed venerate) our parents just the way they are, look the other way even when they are clearly in the wrong and are actually hurting us through their misguided actions.To do otherwise would saddle us with more guilt than we have capacity to bear.

As long as the children are single, this arrangement works out even if very badly for the individual - at least no one else is getting hurt in the process. Once, there is a spouse and some kids in the mix, the toxicity affects the whole new family and often the situation spins completely out of control.

Even where the new family lives independently, the parents are never too far away (emotionally at least even if they are at some physical distance) and in as such, the parent-child relationship issues continues to thrive. While everyone struggles and hurts in this situation, rarely if ever is root cause discussed let alone remedied.

Thanks to the social stigma associated with it, desis are also not the most open-minded about mental health issues - they would much rather sweep such things under the carpet and pretend all is well instead of tackling the problem head on. It is good to see an article like this is a mainstream publication - hopefully many more will follow and heighten the much needed awareness around the issue.

Innovation In India

This NYT story by Vikas Bajaj on anxiety over the slow pace of innovation in India covers all the usual suspects - bureaucracy, corruption, years of stifling central planning, restrictive import tariffs, emphasis rote learning when it comes to eduction and general risk aversion. With all of that innovation is reduced to mere "jugaad" - the formal term is probably "denial driven innovation".

One contributing factor the author neglects to mention is that desis are blessed with high degree of tolerance and the natural ability to accept status quo as karma for the most part. We are not a people given to shaking things up as a matter of course, indeed a lot of us have never had a pressing need to do so.

Innovation and entrepreneurship in India is probably the highest among those communities who experienced upheaval at the time of India gaining Independence. They came in through the western border and fanned around, rooting where conditions were most hospitable. Many left Indian shores to seek their fortunes abroad. These communities  continue to be among the wealthiest and possessed of the greatest spirit of enterprise.

Perhaps they always had the wherewithal to do all of the things they did but adversity became the impetus that pushed them to an entirely different level of resourcefulness. On the east of the border, where families were uprooted from Bangladesh and headed to Kolkata and its vicinities, the story unfolded quite differently for a variety of reasons but that is a whole different topic of discussion.

For the vast majority of educated, middle class Indians, the would be innovators of this century, there has been little need to stick out their necks and take big risks or try something drastically because their survival depended on it. As resources shrink rapidly, the burgeoning population will be forced out of its comfort zone whether they like it or not. To that end, the reliance of a variety of "jugaad" and engagement in multifarious "dhanda" will increasingly become a way of life. It is the knee jerk response ( and not always a harmful one) to the need to do more with less.

Innovation (disruptive and otherwise) will likely happen as a subsequent phase in this process of evolution. It would be unreasonable to expect a Silicon Valley style startup incubation ecosystem in Bangalore but that does not mean innovation will not happen in India - it will just be of a very different flavor and like the taste of "curry" it would take some getting used to specially for those in the Western world. Many examples of such enterprise abound already.

It is just as Iqbal Quadir puts it while discussing the use of mobile phones to transfer money in India and Philippines :

Thus, when technologies—no matter where or why they were invented—are applied to diverse contexts, they provide a foundation for previously undreamed-of permutations and combinations. 

The numbers turn phenomenally large when one talks about India. We have more than our fair share of problems but in each of them, the enterprise-minded would see opportunity when permuted and combined with technology.

Between The Assassinations

Having loved Aravind Adiga's White Tiger, it was a great deal of anticipation that I started reading Between The Assassinations. I am sad to report that my disappointment is complete. Each story is hard to read, the characters are two dimensional. Denouements simply don't happen and when they do the reader does not sense closure. The book reads like a writer's notebook of character sketches and work in progress story ideas - not a bad thing in itself as long as expectations are managed correctly. Billed as outtakes of White Tiger, this would have been very interesting but the reader is set up to expect a brand new book with a come-hither title no less.

I labored from one story to the next hoping to see some of the White Tiger magic once again but sadly that does not happen. I have recommended the White Tiger to both my Indian friends who are not big fiction readers and non-Indian ones who are (or not) but are looking to read something authentically Indian. Both kinds of folks have loved the book for its gritty charm - quite unlike some of my other recommendations (specially to non-desis) like Anita Desai, R.K Narayan or Raja Rao.

Adiga tries grit (relentlessly I might add) once again in Between The Assassinations but it does not end up having nearly the same effect. I was worn out by the all too predictable plots, the done to death cliches of social and religious tensions and the general lack of spark about the writing itself. The title seemed to suggest that Adiga will take a stab at tracing the change to the social, economic and political climate between the two assassinations (Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi) through a set of short stories. That simply is not true. Talk about truth in marketing.

I am not willing to give up on Adiga quite yet - he has too much raw talent for that. In contemporary writing about India and Indians by desis, dominated by cringe inducing faux exocitism , Adiga had come in like a whiff of fresh air with White Tiger. We need him to write more, explore India and the Indian psyche in ways that he has not done yet. I would however scale back my expectations on his next book and hope he will manage to equal or better the White Tiger.

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference.

The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in question asked to find out what kind of technology I was working on these days. After some hemming and hawing at my end and some serious prodding on his, I confessed that I was doing business intelligence and web analytics stuff among other things.

Right away, he tells me that in my line of work I would find it impossible to stay employed stateside. The jobs are drying up fast and furious and only the most enterprising and technology savvy would survive. If I decided to head home to India (as I may very well need to in short order), the competition would so intense that I would need to work for peanuts if I even hoped to find a job. The cost of living in Indian metros being what it is, that would make for a very difficult life. In essence I was burrowing my way into my professional grave as I data mined my days away.

Now, cloud computing ( which is what said dude did for a living) was an area where a man could name his price home (America in his case as he had recently become a citizen) and abroad. There was a huge demand for his skills and no supply to speak of. Only recently a client in India had put him up at the Hyatt Regency for a couple of years so he could consult for them. They also paid him obscene amounts of money for his trouble. Just in case I was hoping to jump on the cloud computing gravy train, he was quick to point out that the chances of one such as myself being able to dig myself out of the hole that I was in were fairly slim. You get set in your ways and become incapable of staying on the bleeding edge of technology.

Each time I am subjected to one of these things, I wonder why I go through it in the first place. Part of the reason is curiosity - I am completely fascinated by how some desi bros think. They simply don't know when to stop once they get in the flow of self-aggrandization, specially when they can tell a sister she has it all wrong. I love to see if they have any limits at all. This dude went on for a full hour and to my credit I gave him my complete and undivided attention. If not anything else, I made a bro feel like king of the world.

Homing Pigeons

A desi of my acquaintance recently became a first time home-owner. Not content with making this leap of faith from renting to owning in these confusing times, he was determined to show me what his new home looked like. I was given a tour of all three floors of this brand new home, told how much the whole thing cost him, what he and his wife would be paying towards mortgage plus month and of course only an absolute dim-wit would still be renting.

He pointed out sagely that any money in the bank was good for toilet paper at best if the currency was USD. His brand new home in a small-town American suburb on the contrary was equity that would keep growing forever and more. How the two statements can mutually coexist and both be true was beyond my ultra-limited grasp of the subject matter so I held my peace and absorbed the bounty of knowledge that was so generously being bestowed upon me.

This is not the first time a desi had impressed on me their superior financial savvy not to mention innate intelligence. I am painfully aware that I am clueless about anything to do with money so it does not help for the well-meaning brethren to rub it in. Each time I have tried to make some financial decisions, the debating punditocracy on either side of the issue have confounded me to the point where I have retired hurt without making any choice at all.

The brethren clearly feel for me and try to illustrate by means of easy to understand examples. I appreciate their efforts and concerns but do also wish they would leave me to my devices as unsophisticated as they are.

Their eyes pop up wide with disbelief when I say I hate living in the sterile suburbs and would like to buy an old house somewhere downtown - in a vibrant neighborhood with some unique of character; that I don't think the so called "good schools" are worth spending all that money over in home prices and property taxes - I would rather save mine, buy a cheaper place and work-partime so I can take over J's education to some extent. They look at me like I have completely lost my mind and look at J like they feel sorry for a perfectly good kid like her to be stuck with an uber-crazy parent like myself. I absorb the pity and condescension the best I can and retreat to my corner until the next purposeful desi comes along to shepherd me along in the right direction.

Desi Fact Check

I logged into to an old email account after a long time to check if it was still active. Back in the day of my disastrous forays into the world of desi dating, I had used this address and no sooner than I had logged in, did I get pinged. The guy's name was not even vaguely familiar but he insisted we had chatted at some point in the past. What is more he insisted on chatting now. I figured the only way to shake if off would be to go offline or go invisible. But I got lucky :

Him: where r u now a days ??
Me: (name of my state)
Him: ok...
Him: how long u have been there ?
Me: is this the typical desi fact-check - how long lived in US, when arrived, visa status, annual salary, rent or own, skill-set ?
Him : lol
Me: I don't respond to any of those qs

Never heard a peep from him after that. I was able to clean-up my Inbox in peace and sign-out when I was done. I guess the desi bro had nothing else to ask me outside my will not respond to questions. Strange are the ways of the brethren.

Desis And Denial

Sometime ago, I had blogged about coaching centers in India and the reports of them having inside access to questions for the entrance exams to the top-ranking engineering schools in India. As expected, several Indian readers commented that I was making sweeping generalizations based on this one reported incident that I had linked to in my post. There have been other reports since besides reports of the inevitable brand dilution. The flaw is as systemic as it is old even if we don't want to believe it and look the other way.

At the risk of being accused of making yet another generalization, I will say that Desis are prone to being in the state of denial about far too much when it comes to India. Most recently this has been the economic meltdown and the notion that it will somehow leave India unscathed.This attitude is probably a proxy for patriotism that is not expressed in any other tangible way. In their minds, denial somehow equals non-existence and defending India against criticism (even when well-deserved) equals national pride. Maybe it has something do with what Dr Ambedkar said about our delusion of being a nation :

There is no nation of Indians in the real sense of the world, it is yet to be created. In believing we are a nation, we are cherishing a great delusion. How can people divided into thousand of castes be a nation? The sooner we realise that we are not yet a nation, in a social and psychological sense of the world, the better for us.

Maybe we try to over-compensate by posturing national pride when in fact we can't even fully articulate what our nation is in "a social and psychological sense". At any rate, for every hundred thousand desis claiming that our college entrance exams are completely sacrosanct, that our education system is able to help our best and brightest get ahead, that our hobbling infrastructure will not put the brakes on even the most powerful growth engine, that crimes against women are an aberration and not the rule, that women have just as much freedom in India as they do in the developed world and indeed the upward trajectory of growth that is helping the a very small minority of the country's population is completely win-win ; there is one desi who is taking a good hard look at what is really going on, calling a spade a spade and what's more doing his or her bit to bring about meaningful change in an organic way.

They would be the ones who will gladly give up a promising corporate career home or abroad to improve the lot of the poor, neglected and disenfranchised in some remote backwater. In my mind, they are the real patriots and unfortunately we have woefully few of them. I must make haste to point out that I do not claim to be in the model desi minority that I have just described though I have been fortunate enough to be acquainted with a few who truly are.

There a far too many of the garden variety India Shinning Kool-Aid drinkers who will flip into denial-mode the moment someone shows them a blemish on this shining patina. They would love for all things that all ail India to be automagically set right. Until then, they could live in their picture-perfect walled off communities, waxing eloquent on the myriad of possibilities that India is and not have the dirt and grime in direct line of sight. I don't see find myself fitting in this demographic either.

Considered from a desi world view, denial seems to the next stage after resignation. When you believe there are no alternatives and that you have no control over things that determine the quality of your life and the future of your motherland, the best course of action might be to go into denial if only to ease the pain.

It is at this point that you read the news of women being molested in broad daylight everyday, of call-center workers being raped by their car drivers, of a five kilometer commute to work taking two hours each way or kids cheating their way into top-ranked schools and calls these incidents one-off and not representative of the state of India as a whole. You really believe this to be the case because the alternate hypothesis is too painful to bear or even consider possible - it shatters the very foundation of your existence.

Playing To Win

G is like my kid brother and is given to checking on me every once in a while. I wish he lived closer, so J could have a sense of extended family. His child is less than a year old and would fulfill J's strong desire to be someone's big sister.

He and his wife have tried to socialize with desis in their city (they have lived in several up to now) and have faced challenges not very unlike my own. I used to imagine that desis are very accepting of two parent families as they view this to be the normal family configuration. Apparently not.

G has lived in America since he came for grad school, worked almost every kind of odd job there is to help pay his bills as a student. He is not the lowest common denominator desi IT worker in that he has a wide variety of interests outside his day job and can carry on an intelligent conversation that has nothing to do with technology or immigration. He happens to be a Bengali who like me never lived in Kolkata. He would love to be part of something pan-Indian in America but that is not the easiest thing to find as he has come to realize.

The desi society here is fragmented in many different ways - FOBs, ABCDs, by region and language, by vintage (as defined by visa and citizenship status) and most importantly by net-worth. This is almost the modern day caste system only with different parameters to define the different stratas of the hierarchy. G says, the minute he encounters a desi, he can almost hear a the click of their mental calculator going on. He is asked the typical questions - Does he own or rent ? Which school district does he live in ? How far along is he in the immigration process ? Where did he go to school in India and America ? What does he do for a living ? Does his wife work ? What does he drive and so on.

By when he has completed the de regieur survey, the other desi has awarded him a composite score. This score would determine if he is in or out of their social circle. He could choose to be in and be treated with condescension if the desi in question rated him lower than themselves. Conversely he could have been rated higher than the other person in which case he would be treated like an interloper if he decided to butt into their circle.

The best outcome in this situation would be an equal score where he will be accepted without overt prejudice. But it gets tricky at this point. Every one is at the start line but desis don't just spend their life standing there smelling the roses. They dash off to reach their destinations and the race is brutally competitive. There is no aspect of life that is untouched by competition.

You either play the sport or step out to be a low caliber bench warmer who is unlikely to be called upon to play (this is exactly what I have chosen to do). G is not able to accept that option and yet he and his wife are simply not wired to thrive in hyper-competitive desi society. Being FOBs, they are not welcome in the "superior" ABCD circles. The locals if they are not overly prejudiced are polite but distant. They have their own lives and are not desperately seeking to befriend random FOBs that happen by.

G finds himself left with no good options. Like a man stranded on an alien planet he seeks signs of life - surely there are desis who think like him and his spouse. Surely they can find a community somewhere. He is not excited about raising a child in the isolation he and his wife find themselves in. While I am able to sympathize with him, I have no guidance to offer.

Divided House

Back in my school days, history lessons taught us how the people of India have always lacked unity allowing foreign invaders to divide, conquer and rule over us for hundreds of years. Our teacher's favorite line used to be "History is important because it helps us learn from mistakes we made in our past so we know not to repeat them" She almost always ended her lesson on that note and would encourage us to find ways to apply lessons from Indian history in our daily lives.

I remembered the wisdom of Mrs. G recently when a client I work for, floated an RFP out to a few Indian vendors along with some near-shore ones in Mexico and Canada. The responses that came back were interesting and educative. The Canadian company did not offer any significant cost advantage over a local development shop but they tried to make up for it by going the extra mile to please. Even before we had asked for it, they came back with design and prototype demos to show us what to expect and of course showcase their capabilities. Everyone was very impressed and it put the vendor in the running despite their high price point. The Mexican outfit came up with a boiler-plate response that was viewed immediately as a testament to their greenness in the technology outsourcing business even if such may not have been the case.

Then there was the two well-known desi shops. There were exhaustive list of clarifying questions from both to make sure they had understood the RFP correctly. We liked the thoroughness and the fact that the questions were quite meaningful. However, it became clear within the next couple of meetings, that there was a significant gap between their initial estimate for the job and what was really involved. They had not been able to size the job right.

It did not help that both outfits lacked the technical maturity that matched the client's excellent architectural direction. Yet they had something to offer - for technology about ten internet years old and a very low cost we could get our job done. Clearly, the A-teams with technical chops to do the job right did not exist at either of these companies - they had most likely been poached by someone else with more money to offer or had started up ventures of their own. With the IT talent spread so thin across the business and no one shop having all the necessary pieces to solve the puzzle it, survival is that much more difficult for everyone.

All things considered, the client ended up picking the Canadian company. I tried to imagine a scenario where the desi shops each had a robust A-team fully conversant in cutting edge technology, demonstrated their ability to think strategic along with the tactical (and not become a victim of paralysis by analysis like they did with ten questions on the exact function of one Submit button) and not trying to under-cut each other on cost. It is likely that everyone would have all fared better, created a fruitful partnership and made more money in the end.

Unfortunately, we desis don't learn lessons from our history. In a very different way from the time of the British Raj we continue to be divided and ruled by foreigners albeit of a different stripe. They get to dictate the rules of engagement that Indian IT companies follow with servility comparable to the minor Rajas and zamindars of the old days. Instead of starving their farmers to death to pay taxes to the Empire, the present day IT overlords are working our young generation to the far end of depression and disease. As they continue to under-cut each other with impunity, the tech drones end up working two shift days and through the Holiday season to make good on the reckless and unreasonable commitments made on their behalf.

Learning On Autopilot

I run into a bunch of desi kids (and parents) each week at J's music classes and each time I am amazed by the few things that they have in common. To begin with, they appear to be highly compliant - working diligently on their Kumon homework while waiting for their music lesson to begin or reading a book with such great concentration that one wonders if it only for pleasure. Right after music lesson, these kids will fan out to go to other activities - tennis, swimming, karate to name a few.

They usually come geared for the next thing on the calendar. They all look pretty serious for their age - even with a room full of 6-10 year olds, there is absolutely no noise or chaos. It is not as if their parents are monitoring them - the kids are pretty self-regulated. If their music lessons are any indication, they go through the motions of "learning" whatever it is their parents want them to on auto-pilot. They practice enough to have the tunes right, are well-prepared for tests and quizzes but you will be hard pressed to hear the sound of joy in their singing.

J used to look around in wonderment when she first started taking lessons. She has even asked me a few times if she should learn some of the other things that these kids were learning. I would guess it is about fitting in with a group that at least resembles her on the outside. I would imagine it would be hard for a desi kid who socializes with other desi kids almost on an exclusive basis to not feel like a loser if they were not learning at least five things at the same time besides getting straight A's at school.

Being a desi parent, I except I share the cultural genes with my brethren. So when, I try to buck the trend and take a different approach with raising J than is the norm in desidom, I do feel some level of anxiety. In taking the road less traveled, I am likely to encounter problems and obstacles for which there is no ready solution in the desi-parenting playbook. I will need to figure stuff out as I go and hope that I get it right. As for J, she has settled in the desi fringe content (as far as I can tell) to think of these kids more like her than not at least in outward appearance.

One Foul Job Ad

I have been following a thread on Immigration Voice for the last couple of days. It concerns a company posting an ad on Dice saying that the client is open to H1-B applicants as long as they are not Indians. No sugar coating there - those were the exact words used on the posting. Needless to say, there was a huge outcry over it and before the end of the day, the poor cog in the wheel sod who had posted the ad at the behest of the end client had been fired by his employer. Dice had pulled the ad off their site even before that had happened. At the time of this writing, the "end client" who had actually asked for non-Indian applicants only had not been touched by any of this.

The fact that stands out most prominently, at least in my mind, is that the company that posted the job ad on Dice is Indian owned and the recruiter in question is desi as as well. This is both a telling sign of the times as well as an example of abysmal depths companies like Abstar will sink to make a few quick bucks. It is no secret that shops like Abstar are owned and staffed by people who bring absolutely no skills to the table except having the legal status to set up shop in America - i.e the owner is typically a permanent resident or a naturalized citizen. Beyond that they operate like they were in an Indian sabzi-mandi selling vegetables (IT contractors) to customers ("end clients" and "preferred vendors to end client") at the best price they can get. Their business practices have about the same level of sophistication and require no better qualifications than what it takes a sabzi-wallah to set up shop at a mandi.

You don't expect the illiterate guy hawking potatoes in an Indian bazaar to have the discernment to judge what is appropriate to post on a public job board. So it does not surprise me at all that the recruiter had no qualms posting such a blatantly racist ad, I am very pleasantly surprised to see the desi brethren rise up in arms against it. We tend to far too accommodating, willing to look the other way and pretend what is happening does not touch us directly or generally be fatalistic about the hand dealt to us by Fate. It is reassuring to see that the we are still capable of collective outrage when outrage is the only acceptable response.

Spelling Bee

As the risk of resorting to a terrible cliche, desi kids winning the Spelling Bee has become as predictable as a cherry on a sundae. It is about yet another contest and yet another desi winner who wants to become a neuro-surgeon when they grow up. We seem to have a little system going there. Blogosphere has been buzzing with desis ruminating on the topic and I figured it would not hurt to thrown my two cents at it.

I don't fully get the point of the Spelling Bee but then I don't get the point of quiz contests or trivia challenges either. It is something desis apparently get and get really good as well. I can understand why I might enjoy watching a figure staking contest or a tennis match - there is deep admiration for the talent the contestants have and amazement at their proficiency. Both are very positive feelings. With a Spelling Bee, my initial reaction is one of concern for the kids who will not win - as a parent I wonder how they will cope with the disappointment after having worked so hard and come so far.

Once, I am over that and get into the groove of things, the contest is like a high stakes, high adrenalin reality show - except the contestants are really young children. If I believed in the concept of the Bee, then enjoying the show would be perfectly legitimate - I would be in awe of the ability of the kids. Since I do not, finding it entertaining is tinged with guilt - I have no right to derive any pleasure out the frenzied efforts of a bunch of tense, totally stressed out kids.

Open Source and Desis

It is very heartening to see that 101 Indian students made it to the Google Summer of Code 2009 program. Hopefully, this and other forays into the world of open-source development by desi techies will shake off the code-coolie stereotype that has come to be associated with the majority of the tribe. Many have bemoaned the lack of Indian contribution to the open source cause and tried to understand this phenomenon.

As Dr Deepak Pathak, chair professor KReSIT, IIT Bombay puts it, Indians have been "net-takers" rather than "net-givers" to open-source and knowledge generation in general. He goes on to add that culturally, desis are not likely to contribute to any significant cause unless they stand to gain something from it as well. In this article written by Ryan Norbauer on his experience working with Indian developers, the author offers his perspective on disproportionate lack of contribution to open-source by desi developers :

Indian employers don’t allow their developers to blog or make contributions to open-source, for fear of losing them to competitors who might contact them directly. And if an employer doesn’t permit his or her employees to contribute back to the platforms they work with on a daily basis, it means they’re probably more obsessed with billing every hour possible than in building up their team and technology.

Having worked with many Indian offshore teams over the years, I have seen the pattern Norbauer writes about repeated in almost every firm. Very likely the US based company using the services of the offshore vendor allowed cost to be the single overriding factor. The author advices against this :

... try to find the most expensive and accomplished provider possible. When you’re already saving money working with an offshore (or at least partly offshore) team, it’s very easy to get greedy and go for whoever bids the lowest rate. But if a team promises they’re going to give you great work for what sounds like an insanely cheap price (and, believe me, these folks aren’t hard to find), red flags should go up immediately; they probably have no idea what they’re doing. It took me a few bad experiences early on to learn this lesson, but it’s one I’ll never forget.

With the start-up culture gathering more and more steam in India, the younger generation of software developers are likely to enjoy a lot more freedom in terms of their career options than their predecessors did. With a good idea and the technical chops to bring it to fruition, a young person is no longer beholden to their "sweat-shop" style employer who will work them insanely hard to bill the hours without giving employees the opportunity to grow their skills and knowledge base. Contributing to open-source is likely to become much more common place when the strait jacket constraints of conventional employment are relaxed or better yet removed.

Name Unrecognized

It is nice to see someone who has been through the system say it like it is about the JEE entrance exam and why it is such a terrible means to a good (?) end - a post I happened by long after it was written.

I think that IIT kids were really brilliant at one stage, but a mind numbing system like the IIT, mind numbing profs and meaningless societal expectations just robs people out of their real passion for life.

Finally, very few in the US even today have heard of the IIT’s. The only companies who know are those hiring massive armies of coders. Its time people get over the IIT hype and start living a life.

I have lived and worked in several cities working for small to large companies in the US and am yet to meet a non-desi who is even familiar with any Indian universities, IITs included. To most of them us desis are this homogeneous glob of brown techies who can write reams of code and sometimes function in other roles within the technology business. Some of us are really good at what we do but there is absolutely no dearth of morons in our tribe as folks will be quick to point out.

We tend to be hard-workers and will not flinch at working late hours, holidays and weekends to make up for the lack of innate ability. We also tend not to be very expensive and that is generally pegged on the H1 status. While many of these characterizations maybe be cliches and stereotypes, they seem to have considerable sticking power.

One way or the other, a brown techie is likely to get the job done. That is not exactly a stellar reputation but is possibly responsible for the success the community has had in the job market. It would have helped all desis in the IT business at least, if the IIT-brand had the name recognition that it is supposed to have.