While checking out at a store, we noticed the cashier's name on her tag was an Indian name. We were speculating out loud the vedic-metric connotations of the name when she caught on and asked how we knew about her name. "We're from India," I explained our familiarity. Still unable to home in on a location, she accommodated us with puzzled, "You're different."
Yup. We're different. Apparently, we have also gone underground just to make it evident. On the other hand and beyond discrete progressive spaces, it packages our strangeness and fixes our subjectivity. Somewhere between the claim and the packaging, the self is aware of the other.
ps: Check out the rants of the other in the 'we' at http://myunrest.blogspot.com/
7 comments:
Hmmmm I wondered for a moment there if I couldn't understand the second paragraph because of an enforced layoff from the Net for the last few days due to connectivity problems. Brought to mind a little story involving the Victorian poet Robert Browning. He wrote this rather ambiguous poem called Sordello and someone took a copy of it to another poet named William Cowper who was ailing in bed. It's said that Cowper was so perplexed by the obscurity of the poem that he got into a panic thinking he was more seriously ill than he thought because he couldn't understand an English poem anymore :D I kinda felt that way too here :P
Seriously I think it's nothing short of criminal that fellow Indians often don't know a thing about us. When I was at college and part of a study tour in Mumbai (it was Bombay then, of course), one of my co-tourists was buying trinkets at a beach and the curious seller asked where she was from and when she said Mizoram, he apparently asked, "Is that somewhere near Mexico?"!!
Similar to your story, my cousin and his wife went through a similar situation at a convention in New York. When they told the people that they were Indians, everybody thought they meant native Americans, including our own Desi Indians who were there at that particular function :-)
Calliopia: Thanks for the anecdote although i hope the Cowper syndrome was only momentary. Philo has taken note!
Illusionaire: That's funny. When i introduced myself as Indian, the next question often was 'which tribe?' Come to think of it, the question doesn't look totally out of place except that 'tribe' presupposed a Hopi or Quecha, etc.
I live and work in an environment which is 24/7 Indian. But even in such an environment, people still come up and ask if I am Indian. I have yet to be mistaken for an Indian outside my environment which has its advantages sometimes :)
Good thing I'm no longer Indian. It's great to be an American now because you don't have to fit into any particular profile...heck you ain't even gotta speak English. How's that for pluralism and tolerance?...LOL.
The same thing happened with us at the famed ROSS store in Market Street, San Francisco, CA. And the name tag surprised us more so because of its Sanskrit originality.
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