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Mike and the Mechanics - The Living Years |
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How do people who wear coats or blazers, speak English and are white (caucasian) affect a child’s perception about sophistication and intelligence? They did seem a bit better than the rest of the human race, afterall they spoke English! Or was it the colonial hangover imprinted in my genes?
Another widely circulated notion in our part of the world was that the whole of the western world was found on loose morals and flimsy family values. You can’t blame us, most of the westeners we saw were the half naked hippies on soul reinvention trips and magical mystery tours(yeh the Beatles too) to the East. While we stood at our international beach resorts fully clothed in our Sunday/Thursday/Friday best, modestly dipping our toes in the incoming surf, there they were, rollicking on our beaches, most of the time half naked or fully naked, smoking pot and cavorting with each other in full view of the public. “Damn!”, we’d think, “which father would tolerate such indecent behavior from his daughter?” As far as we were concerned the West could very well be another planet.
Growing up, with the advent of internet and my own travels in the New World opened my eyes to certain blatant errors in my perspective. I was wrong in associating clothing with intelligence or wisdom. People who wear coats, wear them to protect themselves from the climatic elements and coats or suits cannot be taken as being representative of their sophistication. The 80 year old Idaho potato farmer I talked to, who was wearing a wool coat and a cap had the exact same values and the same concerns as my grand father who was a farmer and a school teacher in the South of India, who’d be perpetually clad in a dhoti and nothing else. They could have been the mirror images of each other except for their contrasting physical appearances. As far as language proficiency was concerned almost all educated Indians(discounting the Hindi belt) can read,write and speak atleast 3 languages with the same ease (Indian English is an accent by itself like British or American, at least quarter a billion people speak it) whereas majority of their US counterparts speak only English.
The other thing I discovered is that small town America has surprisingly high family values, a total antithesis to my views about the "Western" world. To a large extent, I think, the church is responsible. After spending numerous Thanksgivings and Christmases with two stereotypical small town families over the last few years, I realize that their family ties are strong as ours. To my surprise most of them marry early, earlier than their Indian counterparts and are great grandparents by the age of 65! Though this might not stand true for the unmarried yuppies with chill out pads in New York’s Upper East side or San Francisco’s Nob Hill(or any urban agglomeration for that matter), small town America still plays by the old rules. What I had perceived as West was only a small section of the Western society. The dysfunctionality of families is a world wide phenomenon and not confined to America or Europe alone.
The heartland family’s idea of a vacation in a foreign country stretches only as far as Canada, Mexico or the Bahamas or if they were really adventurous – they might do Europe. I found out later that Americans preferred Phuket, Bali and other far eastern tropical resorts and it was mainly the Europeans who came to the beaches in India, including this one a few miles from my home. The heartlanders never made it to this beach in South India were tanned young things came in search of moksha, maaya and marijuana and muddled the perceptions of impressionable eight year olds ;-) and all the while I had been blaming the Americans!
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