Life in the Americas — as seen through my eyes!

I thought of starting these notes when my first article was published in an American newspaper for the first time. The article was a short humorous piece on the difficulty Indians face in America due to their accented English. Immediately after that article appeared, I received requests to continue on that theme because it helped the Americans to put into perspective our struggle to assimilate and settle down in a foreign country.

While trying to work on more of the same stuff, I also started thinking about the perceptions that people back home have of America and whether all those ideas were true and to what extent they differed from reality. The image that most Indians have of America is one that is captured by the cameras slung around the necks of millions of gawking tourists! One thing I can vouch for — America is not that at all or rather, America is not only that.

Tourists go to the touristy places - New York, Los Angeles, Hollywood, Washington — but that’s not only what America is all about. In fact, there is another America that is very different. But which is the real America? Is it possible, or fair, to call a certain aspect of a country real? When then is the other part? I mean, is Bombay the real India? Or is Delhi? Or is Calcutta? Just as each part of our country represents, not India, but that facet of India, so does each part of America.

I thought that it would not only be a good idea to pen down these thoughts, the differences in perceptions and also try to find the rationale that works behind those differences. At first, I just started jotting down one-line notes to myself but some observations just wouldn’t fit into one line! So I had to write a couple of lines, sometimes a paragraph and as is the writer’s wont, these paragraphs soon ran into pages!

And that, my friends, is the genesis of these short notes on daily life in America.

I am sure there are plenty of similar and probably more insightful stories out there but there is a difference to mine and it’s exactly that — that they are my insights! After all, my observations are based on life as I have seen it in Illinois and a bit of it on my few journeys to other states. So in that sense, they may not be representative of the entire American people. It is always difficult — and sometimes wrong — to generalize about a whole nation. To that extent, I would hesitate to put down my words in stone. Often, one finds one’s opinions evolving as one’s roots go deeper into foreign earth and such evolution can often be confused for inconsistency of opinion.

But I have spent almost three years here already and what I have seen in the other places I have visited hasn’t been too different from what I have seen in my little town in central Illinois. The client I am with now is one of the biggest employers in the US and the head office here in Bloomington attracts talent from all over the country, so one does get a small view of people from other places. Of course, sometimes it also attracts certain people of no talent from faraway lands like India, but that’s a story for another day and maybe I should leave it to the Americans to tell! If they survive me!

I am sure the Americans of New York and Boston and the west coast and their lives will be different from the self-admitted ‘country folks’ out here in the Midwest but we’ll get to them when I get there!

So read, agree, disagree but enjoy!