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
