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Culture shock

siddhesh.substack.com

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Re: Culture shock

#161

Post by no1lives4ever »

losvedir wrote: post #5

What a fun read! I've never been to India but it's fun to infer what the reverse culture shock would be for me from the points here. Like, can you not sit on the grass at a university there?

You can sit on the grass at a university or even sit in most places where you can physically sit. But it is not a very common thing to do. I would say the main reasons why most people dont do that is because it would get books and clothes dirty if you sit on most parks and outdoor spaces. I would not want my books and other items to get dirty when I study, and hence would avoid most such locations to study.

Having said that, you can find enough people sitting in the lawns and steps around most indian universities & colleges.

Re: Culture shock

#162

Post by codesections »

silentsea90 wrote: post #98
rushabh wrote: post #93

This brought back a lot of nostalgia. (I was Indian grad student in a state university in the North East in ‘01) For me the killer is the “master of the universe” feeling you get in the United States coming from India. Everything is in order and under control from the lawns in suburban homes, to supermarkets and libraries to traffic and restaurants. You see a lot more straight lines and perfect Bézier curves. This is…

When I go back home to India, the very first cab from the Mumbai airport to home is like a dangerous roller coaster ride. No lanes, criss crossing autos(tuktuks), bouncing on small potholes on the road, smoke, honks, buses and cars in close proximity etc is a sensory overload. I breathe a sigh of relief when I come back to the US, but I do miss home.

> When I go back home to India, the very first cab from the Mumbai airport to home is like a dangerous roller coaster ride.

Somewhat oddly, I had exactly the opposite experience the one time I visited Mumbai — but I was coming from a few weeks in Ahmedabad, where traffic lights were basically a (typical ignored) suggestion.

Re: Culture shock

#163

Post by no1lives4ever »

AutumnCurtain wrote: post #22
losvedir wrote: post #5

What a fun read! I've never been to India but it's fun to infer what the reverse culture shock would be for me from the points here. Like, can you not sit on the grass at a university there?

I'm interested in the apparent intolerance of shirtless men, I didn't realize that was a thing.

Well.. it is more of a class thing outside of residential complexes. You can see a lot of Indian males shirtless or wearing a inner vest inside their homes, but visible from outside (e.g. on balconies, etc).

But out in public, the only men w/o a shirt would be those who are too poor to afford one or those who are poor, doing manual work and who want to get rid of their shirt on a hot day.

Re: Culture shock

#164

Post by pjc50 »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #27

I worked at a multi-national company that frequently flew people to the United States HQ offices for short visits or sometimes longer stays. For many of the younger developers this was their first direct exposure to the United States. Interestingly, most of them had built up a lot of preconceived notions about the United States from social media sites like Reddit. Many of those sites project an extremely pessimistic…

> third world country with cell phones

As a Brit who's visited a few times, to me it seems that America is both the glittering future and a banana republic at the same time, overlaid on top of one another. There's no ceiling and no floor. Lots of places have glaring poverty right round the corner from the tourist parts, all round the world. Unfortunately there was a spate of British tourists getting shot in Florida because they'd taken a hire car to the wrong part of town.

The American media hegemony exaggerates everything as well. We're more likely to hear about bad events in the US because they're great at filling news channels.

Re: Culture shock

#165

Post by Zababa »

jlawson wrote: post #106
fellellor wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there no wealthy people, over there, who just don’t want to work out?

Not being obese has basically nothing to do with "working out". It's all about diet. Nobody worked out before 1960 and nobody was fat (and lots of people were poor). Nobody in India is fat and nobody work out and they're largely poor. To your question - Lots of them. I'm (relatively) wealthy and I don't want to diet. But I do it anyway because it's worth the short-term suffering for the long-term gain. It's a super o…

> Nobody worked out before 1960 and nobody was fat (and lots of people were poor). Nobody in India is fat and nobody work out and they're largely poor.

What percentage of the population had desk jobs before 1960? Standing/moving all day burns a lot of calories, I would assume enough so that you don't put on a few pounds each years which can lead to obesity in the 40s. Of course that's not all the population, some are obese before being teen. But I think that's still an important part. You can't outrun your stomach if you eat a surplus of 2000 calories each day, you can if you eat a surplus of 200.

Re: Culture shock

#166

Post by codesections »

dafoex wrote: post #153

The bit about road names borrowing from other places is true in the UK, but it has a function: London Road will, eventually, lead to London, as will most any road with another city for it's name. I imagine this couldn't be possible in the states due to the absolute vastness of it all, so unless New York Street grows four extra lanes and magically becomes an interstate, it's surely just named in homage to New York.

> I imagine this couldn't be possible in the states due to the absolute vastness of it all

No, this absolutely happens in the states too — just on a smaller scale. Roads often have the name of the next town they run through. (One mountain town I'm familiar with in North Carolina has only 4 roads leaving town, each named for the town you'll arrive in if you take that road).

The county that applies that to pretty much every road (or at least used to) is Italy. I have vivid memories of trying to navigate the Italian highway system pre-satnav when none of the signs used the highway names on my map; instead, they listed the next city the highway would hit — frequently one that I wasn't familiar with. (And no, apparently all roads do not lead to Rome)

Re: Culture shock

#167

Post by ido »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #20
e4d5 wrote: post #2

Hey, as another Indian immigrant here I do want to say that most of these observations are spot on. There's a couple of things in there that are just correlated to the fact that the author is around young/wealthy people, like the low obesity rate, fancy cars, shirtless dudes, book-reading in public. I had quite a surprise when I started working at a smaller town and consistently started seeing older and grumpier peop…

> There's a couple of things in there that are just correlated to the fact that the author is around young/wealthy people, like the low obesity rate, fancy cars, shirtless dudes, book-reading in public. I mean, he was on a university campus, so fit young people reading books isn't that much of a surprise. But I agree with you, US is a nation of extremes in some ways. There are places I've been in the US where quite l…

I remember visiting Atlanta for work for a couple weeks years ago (I'm not American).

"Everyone" in midtown was fit. Cross the border to the adjacent neighborhood (don't recall the name but it's a lot more residential and just barely still accessible by foot from down/midtown due to how far away everything in Atlanta is) and more than half the people you see are obese.

Oh and the homeless people are a lot less scary than in San Francisco. I felt safe asking a homeless man for directions in Atlanta (didn't realize he was homeless until he pointed at the tent he lives in & asked me for a dollar after we spoke) & I would probably not dare do that in downtown SF (I probably wouldn't do that in Berlin either for that matter, even though homeless people aren't as aggressive here).

Another difference is the police - in Germany, Austria & Israel (countries I've lived in so far) it's not unusual to ask a police officer who happens to pass near by for stuff like directions but when I asked a policeman (who wasn't obviously doing anything) in Atlanta where something is he very obviously didn't want to talk to me, just answered my question with "not here" and didn't even look at me while doing so. This was in broad daylight at a "nice"/central part of town so I don't think it was because I was interrupting some police action?

Re: Culture shock

#168

Post by sweaty »

I've lived in the US for a while, this reads very nostalgic. But I never really had a sense of culture shock, I was going through the motions of course, adjusting and getting used to American culture, but the 'shock' was never really there while I was living there. The shock came after I moved back to The Netherlands and realised how strange the US was compared to it.

Is delayed culture shock a thing?

Re: Culture shock

#169

Post by jhgb »

jlawson wrote: post #106
fellellor wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there no wealthy people, over there, who just don’t want to work out?

Not being obese has basically nothing to do with "working out". It's all about diet. Nobody worked out before 1960 and nobody was fat (and lots of people were poor). Nobody in India is fat and nobody work out and they're largely poor. To your question - Lots of them. I'm (relatively) wealthy and I don't want to diet. But I do it anyway because it's worth the short-term suffering for the long-term gain. It's a super o…

> and nobody was fat

So the baroque ideal of beauty was a contemporary fantasy?

Re: Culture shock

#170

Post by Zababa »

baby wrote: post #113
the_af wrote: post #44

Is the car respecting pedestrians a thing everywhere in the US, or just where this person has been? My very limited experience in the US (NYC, San Diego and Miami) has been hit or miss regarding traffic, and I wouldn't trust drivers to stop. I know the story in some European cities is different. I was impressed in London, and a Belgian friend of mine often crossed the streets of Brussels without stopping to look at t…

Living in SF, I’m always impressed that people stop so quickly to let you pass. Doesn’t happen that much in France. But also: streets in France are much narrower so it’s easier to just jay walk.

In France half of the time people don't even stop when they're supposed to (zebra walk without signals).
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