Between Cultures
If you grow up between cultures, if you get accustomed to traveling, it’s easy to find yourself always on the outside of things, looking in.
Pico Iyer
The Man within my Head
A global lockdown brings us closer together than when there is a freedom of movement. The severity of lockdown changes by country and living in Tokyo, I have been lucky not to have any restrictions on movement. The trains and buses still run, few people take them, empty long distance trains and planes fly out the stations and airports and people limit their movements out of their homes.
India has had a much more restricted lockdown , limiting all non-necessary outings. One of the outcomes, positive in most senses , is enhanced communication over social media.
I have spoken to friends , I had not spoken for months , years. While most of the catching up was for the positive there were occasional reminders that 25 years after leaving college, we still are the same people. Hidden behind those wrinkles, layers of fat, or revealed from behind the shedding hair, we still remain as prejudiced and spiteful as ever.
The genuine warmth at reconnecting hides the momentary bitterness of disagreements. One of my good friends from my University days, in fact the one whom I have been most in contact with, commented that someone with my name, living in Japan, speaking in Punjabi would sound strange, almost freakish.
The name my parents gave me, though normal in certain parts of South India, is almost unpronounceable in Punjab the place I grew up in. When I went to pick up my drivers license, the person at the counter struggling to read my name, finally gave up and asked “What caste is this name from”?
I had to explain it wasn’t a Punjabi name, so there was no point associating a caste with it. Then there was the time in Bangalore, a traffic cop stopped me while riding my bike, bearing Punjab license plates, and I replied to him in Kannada.
“Oh you speak our language”, he said.
I thought of explaining that the language was the one of my forefathers, and I had always spoken the language, though by borrowing words and accents from other languages.
A couple of years ago , riding a train outside of Tokyo, on my way to a hike, an older white man sitting in the seat opposite to me, staring at me for a while said “Let me guess, you are from Bangalore, work in an IT company in Japan”.
I did not have the heart to explain to him that it was much more complex than that and smiled telling him he was kind of right. I did come to Japan from Bangalore, I do work in an IT company, but one which is spread across Shanghai, Tokyo, Dallas & Barcelona. A Global marketplace, distributed working style, makes the concept of limiting one to a specific country meaningless.
We are running out of definitions of who we are , because we are from all of those places where we have had footprints in, each place influences and conditions us into who we are. One can eat an Indian Rajma Chawal with as much relish as a Cuban beans rice, crave for a chicken biryani and a Chinese Fried Rice equally and have an Indian and a Bulgarian buttermilk without judging between them.
We belong to all those places which we experience and equally without prejudice we belong to none of them.
