There's something about British culture that I miss very much when I am abroad, even in my own country India. I did not realise I loved it so much because I guess it is one of those things that for me is like water to fish. I took it for granted. I suppose in a way I had absorbed a feel and sense for it, even a natural knack for it, because I grew up immersed in English literature. As now, all through my life, I have spent time with books and the written word a lot more than people or the social world. People in those books had this quality I am talking about—one could call it a sense of humour but that's a bit general, I'd call it wit. This wit relies on a good facility with language and is 'dry', includes sarcasm, irony, puns, word plays, paradoxes, sharp observations... you get the picture?

This, my favourite brand of humour, is everywhere in the UK. Because it was already something I regularly enjoyed and fed on before stepping on English shores, though via books or movies or online mostly, it never even seemed that remarkable when I found it in real life! It does seem so now...when I think about it. It makes even very ordinary encounters with people such as the taxi driver or shop salesperson or passenger on a train very interesting. I don't mean to say that every British person has it or every Indian lacks it. But by and large, I find the level and quality of (my kind of) humour pretty high in the UK. I call it ‘my kind’ but it is more culturally specific to the UK so that makes sense. That also means that I probably come across as a much more interesting person in the UK culture, as much as they come across to me. A bit like an instrument fitting into the right orchestra.

I remember this time recently when I was going by taxi to give my 'Life in the UK' test. The British driver was quite curious about what kind of questions were covered in the test. I admitted that general knowledge was not my thing at all. Questions around sports for example might be quite simple for people who follow sports, but I don't have a clue. Luckily there would be questions on literature such as identifying Shakespeare's sonnets and that would be easier for me. He wasn't so confident about his Shakespeare it turned out. Almost 10 mins before time we reached my destination. He said to me as I was dropped off, 'You have 10 mins extra to revise now' (or something to that effect). To which I said, 'If I haven't got it yet, I don't think I'm going to get it in the next 10 mins' (or something like that). We both guffawed to that ;)

[I passed the first time after studying barely 2 weeks so I must have got it ;)]

I participated in a reading group the other day. The discussion was on Goffman's concept of teams, different from what we ordinarily understand by teams. I have bumped into Goffman here and there and always found my interest piqued. There is so much to read and so little time!

He looks at a team as a group of people who want to maintain a particular idea of the team. This could just be two people or more. His examples explain the point better. Say there is a husband and wife. The wife is the dominating one. But when a guest arrives, she pretends to be submissive. The husband intuitively knows to play along. Or say there is a boss who speaks familiarly to his secretary. If a new client comes in, they both might pretend to be very formal with each other. Without ever explicitly agreeing, they both know what impression they want to give as a team. Goffman talks about how some individuals may not play along to the team definition and may give away the game. Someone who mentions inside info in front of a customer for example.

One of the things that struck me as I was reading this is that Goffman assumes that everyone is constantly doing 'impression management' or playing a role for the benefit of an audience. I do think many people do constantly do that. It's as if they are always wearing a mask and you really have no clue who they really are. Goffman talks about how there can be single person teams, where you are your own audience. These perpetual mask-wearers, I have a feeling, sort of internalize the mask after a point. They believe their own lies. Unlike those who are conscious of the mask and take it off when they feel safe enough. I suppose my favourite people are those with whom I do not feel the need to wear a mask. On the other hand, if I sense a person is wearing a mask with me, I infer: 1. They do not trust me, and 2. I cannot trust them. I do not see these people as team players in Goffman's sense because a team has to have internal loyalty. Which to me means revealing oneself to the other. The thing that Goffman doesn’t seem to be worried about but is rather high on my list is authenticity. The question might be, isn't playing a role essentially inauthentic? My answer is yes but it doesn't have to be. For instance, the definition of the team itself could place honesty and authenticity at the core of it? The impression we want to give then is congruent with who we believe we are or who we want to become, not a fake persona we want to display depending on who is at the other end.

Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after ~ Henry David Thoreau

I have a different view on this. It seems to me most people are more about the fish than fishing. They aren't even about the quality of fish. More the quantity. Basically, about maximizing fishes. There must be some joy they get out of it. It's hard to believe people would pursue something so blindly if they had no conviction about it. What that conviction is, is what beats me! But such folks surround us everywhere. They are the majority, as it seems to me. They run around in a frenzy of activity because gathering fish, whatever else it may not be, is certainly enough to keep any man (or woman) busy.

The folks who are not about the fish, finding themselves sort of overpowered by these fish-obsessed types, have some choices to make. Hard choices all of them. Because if everybody believes we have to maximize the fish, they are going to make damn well sure you focus on them fishes. Forget your mumbo jumbo about enjoying the fishing, the nature, the skill, the practice, etc etc. Just bring it in. Count them, will you? Those who count are going to be counted. So what will you do? Good fish, bad fish, unusable fish, it doesn't matter. Keep counting. A choice one makes is to not lose one's love of fishing no matter how much you have to resist the fish counters. Not become like them or become them. They wouldn't know the difference, but you do. And you have to keep holding onto it. Tight. The other part of that choice is to pull enough fish that the fish counters don't throw you off the boat completely. You cannot afford to show that it is 'not the fish you are after'. If you want to keep fishing that is ;)

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Pic: My lunch spread at the campus canteen hereabouts in China. I sure enjoy having warm food for lunch! :) I picked the yellow cake type thing with black sesame sprinkles on top because it resembles what we call 'dhokla' in Gujarati Indian cuisine (complete with black mustard sprinkling) but it's nothing like that!

“I'm rich enough that I didn't ask the price of a loaf of bread at a farm stand and accidentally bought an $18(!!!) loaf of sourdough but not so rich that I haven't stopped thinking about it for the past 24 hours.” ~ @karol

That's me these days ;)

Recently I seem to be talking much more openly about one aspect of my early life than I used to, be it on this blog or in the real world. That aspect is finances or money. It has made me wonder why I used to be closed on this topic before or why I have felt like I could open up in recent times.

One big reason I believe is the culture in India where I grew up and which subconsciously deeply ingrained in me certain ideas about wealth and the lack of it. It wasn't something that my elders told me or that I learnt in school or that was mentioned explicitly. Like a lot of cultural ideas, it got passed on in an implicit way, so much so I did not realise I had them until I started living in a different one. The idea—put in very loose terms—associates a kind of moral superiority with wealth and the opposite with lack of wealth. What this translates to in terms of attitudes is that money is not seen as something separate that you "have" which you earn, lose, accumulate, and so on in a matter-of-fact way, distinct from your worth as a person, but something that defines who you are. It makes you more or less of a person, if you get what I mean. It makes sense then that growing up in such a society, particularly considering we lived in a very affluent neighbourhood embodying this supremely superior attitude, I came to see my own financial condition as a matter to be kept private, even hidden. After many years of leaving those conditions behind, they were as if they had never been. One was legitimately restored to good society so to speak. Become a person again in all senses of the term.

It is only after living away from India for a significant bit of time and being exposed to completely different cultural ideas about money or the lack of it... that I have started re-examining my own past and present relationship to it. It's a bit like a fog lifting—I can see more clearly now, I can talk more freely now. Strangely, now that I feel like I can talk more freely about it, without losing any claim to personhood, the past has become even more present. I see its hand pretty much everywhere... and that's why I guess it comes up all the time...

“If only there could be an invention that bottled up a memory, like scent. And it never faded, and it never got stale. And then, when one wanted it, the bottle could be uncorked, and it would be like living the moment all over again.”

~ Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

This blog is my scent bottle! :)

I have arrived all in one piece after all :)

People say worrying is sort of like making yourself suffer twice. Perhaps depends on the type of worrying? One is where you worry about something with no intent to do anything. Almost as an excuse or avoidance of actual activity. A bit like complaining. There's the bad kind where complaining is an end in itself. There is also the good kind that points out what's wrong as a starting point for a solution. Not to indefinitely wallow in it.

I started thinking about this difference because in a very concrete instance my 'worrying' led me in a positive direction. It generally does but in this instance the evidence was stark. At Manchester airport, I was asked if I want to get my checked-in bags in Beijing or directly at my final destination in China. I have travelled about three times to this destination so far and every time I was told I had to get my bags in Beijing and then check them in again. I was never given an option. But this was the first time I was travelling by a Chinese airline and even though it wasn't the same Chinese airline as my connecting one, the situation was different enough for options to be different. However, I was obviously 'worried' so I double/triple checked this information and each time the official told me the same thing. On the flight I couldn't let go of my worries. My mind refused to settle. A part of me was mad at myself for worrying in spite of official information that should be accurate. When I landed in Beijing and saw the baggage carousel, I had the urge to enquire again. That was quite difficult because of the thick language barrier. To my surprise and not-surprise in a way, it turned out I absolutely had to get my bags off in Beijing. What followed was 3-4 hours’ madness because my bags did not turn up with all the other luggage and the airport officers had to get hold of the airline folks to locate my bags. Which they did finally in some transfer hold!

When I got to a different terminal much later in the day to check in the same bags again for the domestic flight, the counter official seemed confused. She asked if I had two more bags because the system showed two checked-in bags. I explained the whole story to her. When the matter got resolved, the big question on my mind was: Would it have been okay if I had never taken out my bags at this airport? Would they have gone to the domestic airport anyway? Did my worry actually create this hullabaloo? She said no, there was no way they would have been sent through. I was supposed to take them through Customs at Beijing. That in a rather odd way was good to hear. It meant that my worry actually saved the day! In a way I think what I am calling ‘worry’ is a niggling intuition that is trying to warn me of something, not in a magical way, but based on subconscious processing of past and present patterns of data. My distrust of authoritative information is also helpful because my intuition does not blindly accept such information.

For all that I have to say that people who do not incessantly 'worry' (or process data constantly intuitively) may get into predictable difficulties or face negative outcomes more often but they probably live an easier or happier life. In my case I might predict where things are headed and avoid foreseeable bumps maybe, but at a huge ongoing cost...

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'Death arrives; it would be a thing to dread, if it could remain with you. But death must either not come at all, or else must come and pass away.' ~ The Epistles of Seneca, Epistle IV