North American Culture

Dear Readers,

Hope you all are doing great in your respective lives. I am doing good too. Life is moving ahead as i contemplate it ...

This time i am going to write about something different. This time i am going to write something about North American (NA) culture. Yes, all you folks outside North America heard it right ... North America does have culture and in this post, i will make an honest attempt to describe it.

Few months ago i decided that i will grow my beards. I did that because i realised that i have never ever in my whole life experimented even a little with my looks. North America has an air of freshness and freedom that somehow gives you courage to experiment. So, I ended up growing my beards for a month. Then an interesting incident happened. While i was walking through the university campus one day, one of my friends from India asked me that why i am growing my beards and is Osama bin Laden my motivation to do so?!! Now off-course this friend of mine was joking but this incident left me thinking. I wondered why an Indian person was the first and the only one till now to ask this question and why none of my North American friends have raised this point yet??

I decided to do an experiment. I decided to grow my beards even longer and note how people from different countries react to it. Now i should accept that being in a Canadian university gave me a great opportunity to do such an experiments because of large international student community here. I grew my beards for almost 8 weeks after which it became unbearable to handle. So i had to shave, but my observations were really interesting. 

Out of everyone who saw my beards, my parents reacted in most extreme fashion. I usually make video calls with them on skype so that we can see each other. They saw my beards and almost tripped ... My dad even went as far as saying that police will jail me as i look like a terrorist! (by the way, he also asked if all my professors here have beards and if they are my motivation for having big beards :P) ... My mom also became very concerned ... she said that i look like a Muslim man and that i should change my looks and shave immediately. I couldn't reply anything on this and changed the topic of discussion. 

At university, all the people who made comments or gave a strange look at my beards were either from Indian Subcontinent or from Africa.

None, not even a single North American said anything like that. A male NA friend said that a hat will look great with my beards and a female NA friend said that beards look good on me and that i should always keep them. My beards became topic of discussion at one of the parties i went to with my NA friends. Everyone treated it just like a beard, nothing else ... nobody attached any images with it. 

And this concept of individuality i think is one of the major pillars of North American culture. In India, we divide on every single thing possible ... religion, colour, caste, province, language ..... list goes on ... One of my relatives in my hometown in India are living from past 40 years in a house which shares a common wall with a mosque ... but they have never once visited it! Here in North America, people from all over the world come .. with their different religions, languages, castes, colours, food habits, cultures, beliefs ... they all live equally, they all excel and prosper and make a better life for themselves.

Now i am not saying that everything is rosy here, there are off-course individual cases. But in general, i find, that the ability of North Americans to see every human being on planet with equal eye is very very impressive. 

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." - This sentence has been called "one of the best-known sentences in the English language" and "the most potent and consequential words in American history".

When i go back home, this is a quality, a culture, which i would like to take back with me from North America.  

Peace...

Karan

Thinking in new'fun'land ...

Holla,

me, from past few years atleast :)

Long time no see huh? Sorry, but it seems that i get motivation to write only when i am on road. Life seems meaningless and aimless otherwise which is not a very good mindset to write blogs i guess. But anyways, I recently moved to a new house and from past few days i am hanging out with a new bunch of awesome friends. It’s a much needed change in my life and i am happy at the moment :) (Wow!).

I finished my second semester few days ago and all my required courses are done. I have like 16 months to myself now for my research and thesis. This thought is scary for me, to keep myself motivated for so long to work on some random naval architecture stuff. But i guess i knew before hand that i will have to go through all this and hence i have been mentally preparing myself. Do i sound like an utterly unmotivated person? Voila, you got me right!

I think engineering as an organized profession is just a result of rat race of the world and universities churning millions of engineers everywhere are just factories fueling the industrial economy. Where are the days where people used to do things because they were really really interested in them?? This is something i see as a side-effect of globalization. An Indian is supposed to work hard because an American or a Chinese is working hard … what a bullshit! I don’t understand this but at the same time i do not have a better system to propose. It just seems to me that this is the natural way of life and somehow it makes me believe in the ancient Indian philosophy that everything is predecided. In a way it also makes me feel very very small in front of i don’t know what. I ask all humans who consider themselves as most superior of all a very simple question. Come up with a global governance system where there is no war and no inequality. Have we ever done it in past 5000 years? Can anybody do it in future?? I don’t think so. You see what i mean now? We are all just part of something random, prisoners of our own image.

And this realization sucks, believe me it does. It has made me a sad person in general. Whenever i do anything which can be considered hedonistic in a smallest possible way, i feel bad. If i drink, or eat good food or party, i feel bad. I feel bad for someone who has no access to all this and i feel bad for my helplessness in helping them. I feel bad when i waste time because i think i should work hard, but then i think work hard in what?? How is naval architecture supposed to create a world with no war and no inequalities?? Shouldn’t we put our time and resources in solving this question then in our blind quest of never-ending materialism! Sometimes i think those humans in ancient India who spent all their life in seclusion thinking about life must have pondered over this question. Weren’t they the most modern human beings who ever walked the earth, the only human beings who were real and free from the prison of their own images?? Hats off ...

At the moment, i neither have a solution to propose to this world, nor do i have balls to lead a secluded life like many of my ancestors did. And it makes me sad.

Conclusion: It’s bad for you to think a lot when you don’t have enough will power to do things that you think are right. (Huh, even the conclusion is a catch 22)

Anyways, i hope i have depressed you enough by now, or maybe you just think i am crazy. Whatever it is, I would love to hear from all of you on this. Till then, chao chao.

For a better world...
Karan

My sms conversation with a girl :)

Hi everyone,

It will soon be 6 months of my living in newfoundland. Life has been good till now. I just wanted to share some interesting sms/text exchanges i had with a girl few nights ago.
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Me: U Blond!

She: You black … (not politically correct nay?) I refer to your hair too but now I sound racist :’(

Me: Racism is history so evolve; you are a mystery I wanna solve ;)

She: Oh dear god don’t even go there! This disease aint one you wants near!!

Me: You are not a disease but a remedy, without which my life is a comedy (H)

She: Comedy is such that one desires in the cold cruel world of Expires!

Me: World is cold and cruel when you are alone, in lonely nights you moan, let me take your pain, let us walk the tropical rain!

She: Agreed the world is a dungeon. Too bad the monsters are within. Only way is to be born again. Tho with u ive been locked in.

Me: It’s not clear to me what you said, ‘was it no?’ I dread … All I need is a chance, my heart dances at your glance :$

She: Do they dance or jive, I ask? The light flickers behind your mask. I fear the blood that runs thru yer veins is clotted and on my shirt you will stain <:/>

Me: People always complain, but it is not love if it doesn’t leaves a stain! No one is perfect give it a try, let the fucking stain dry …

She: That’s a sure problem given the stains have bled through. Now my hearts out drying and im through waiting on a cue

Me: I know you need your time, the truth is sublime. Love is the only cure for broken heart, as they say when they are high!

She: Id love nothing more now than to drown myself in a high..To be rendered totally inoccupiable for just a while by
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I am expecting a dinner date with her sometime soon :D

Peace!
Karan