Tuesday, February 9, 2010

My time in US of A - part 2 : Culture Shocked

The second part of any migration process is the culture shock. If you are not familiar with culture shock, I recommend you go over, Geert Hoefsted in his book , Cultures and Organizations : Software of the mind. To put it in short, you get shocked by the changes around you like someone not peeing in the corner street and not littering the roads. Sarcasm apart, this part was a big shock to me. One thing, I didn't experience any such sensation ( If you count out the spine tingling, the moment the plane landed on the US soil, but it is more of a mental sensation rather than a culture shock). This could be due to the fact that, there were more Indians in the airport lounge than there were americans and because, the people who picked me up from the college were also Indians. You could tell that Culture Shock decided to shock me with a non cultural shock instead.

Really, you don't feel that you are in foreign land here in UHCL. There are a lots of Indians around anytime. Infact, the classes have utmost 10 americans and rest of all, from India and Vietnam. There is an inside joke in the university that they are going to change the university name to University of Hyderabad instead. Jokes apart. Life was not tough to start with. The guys I stay with are all from around Tamilnadu and surprisingly, most of them are from the same university. And my stay begins in Houston, with no culture shock, which is itself a shock to me.

Life in the US is not exactly as you could imagine back in India. If you are a L1 or a H1 visa holder, you have got a SSN which makes your life a lot easier than the F1 guys. Man, life is one tough son of a bitch for us. You dont havea SSN, hence, you are cut off from all the facilities US has to offer. There is also another thing called credit history, which is a very important thing for all the financial transactions in the states. And the amount of time, the guys have for their business and private life is also amazing. They are generally very well organized than most in India.

One another thing about US of America is the no culture perception. But, one should realize that US has not just one culture but a confluence of cultures brought to it by its immigrants. US is actually culturally rich. The next time you go on and say about how US has no culture, think again. You are welcome to practice any culture you see befit unless it causes widespread destruction. But generally, the immigrant groups follow their own within themselves.

For Indian people coming to the US. You have lots of other Indian people here. Atleast in Texas. Particularly Houston hosts the 3rd biggest Indian population in the United States. So there are lots of Indian restaurants here. You can get everything you get in India here. All I can tell you is that you won't be getting homesick anytime in a while. The only thing you will miss is your family, if you are away from it. But, that's ok with the technology available today, even that is eliminated by video conferencing and blah blah blah.

So, that brings me to the end of this, hopefully, I will be writing about my college experiences soon.

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