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
6 comments:
Wow Karan...This is a very cool way of seeing NA culture. As a NA myself who travels a lot, I am most of the time extremely critical toward this ''culture that's supposed to mine'', and I even come to hate it for many reasons. It feels good that an ''outsider''can think of it in such a nice way...thank you for expressing it.
(signed: Marion^^)
Is this abt the pic thats on fb ? Then it looks cool :P ... if it was some other then post it :)
i think the way you have stereotyped indian mindset, it should be taken with a pinch of salt...agreed that people in north america are more liberal or open minded but here in india things are not so bad.
i too have experimented with mustaches, goatees and side burns, going unshaven for days together (and remember i have to go to office everyday and meet different people too in the course of job) and yes people have reacted to it in different ways but mostly in terms of how it suits my face and yes there were incidences where it was related to certain ethnicity or relegion but that was also done only in a joking way... and as for our families, my dear friend we must not forget no matter where we are in life, studying or working or getting old, we will always be lil kiddos to our parents, and they have decided for most part of your life(at least till now) what kind of haircut you get or what clothes you wear or how you look.
So i think its natural for them to react in that way, anyone will, even american parents do too, its just that they might not be so vocal about it as the generation gap out there is much much wider than what is here (gap here is increasing too but then again its a different issue)
But i will agree with one thing that yes acceptability of change is much better out there than here in india and yes its gonna need change and it is already happening..
warm regards
Ishteel Maheshwari
Dude was it abt the NA Culture or was it all abt ur fucking beard??
well i most certainly cannot admit it.. although i can't possibly deny what you may have encountered....and the more basic question is "does growing beard and the response define NA culture? . in all probability the answer would be NO...i think comments on ur beard related to muslim and osama is just because of accesibility issue. here u hav grown up with all kinds of religions and thus it is easy to picture you that way. growing beard there does not have this picturesque imagination and that is all i think is there to it.
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