Just had a weird scuffle with an auto driver and the cops. I'm beginning to worry - like, really worry - that I'm turning into a cautionary tale. (Speaking of cautionary tales, the planned Kashmir Literary Festival - which I'd wanted to attend - has been cancelled thanks to political agitation by a handful of intellectuals.)
Today's blog post is about language/culture. I just read a friend's blog post. She talks about how, when she first moved to the United States from India, she struggled not with words but with ideas: "Pre-liberalisation me didn't know a Reuben from a BLT, and even if I had, my knowledge of provolone was as theoretical as my knowledge of snow."
We often focus on language as the key to a culture. But that's not even half of it. I know expats in India who really hate it here, and a lot of them will say that their biggest challenge is that they don't speak the language. Which, while definitely true, is only part of the truth. When it comes to describing the fundamental experiences that network us one to the other (the taste of provolone, the feel of snow) language falls apart at the seams. If you don't get it, you just don't get it. What wears a foreigner down, eventually, is the endless stream of blank looks at words like "muffin" and "napkin" and "toilet paper," all of which go by different names.
This problem operates in two directions. I've gone into Indian restaurants in the United States and seen paneer described as follows: cubes of Indian cottage cheese. Anyone who's tasted both of these things would know that comparing paneer to cottage cheese is like comparing wood to drywall: they may occasionally serve the same purpose, but that doesn't tell you much about the nature of either wood or drywall. Which is why I always hated having to explain Indian things to my American friends. I could describe a lehenga or a dosa, but doing so deconstructed language to the point that it became fundamentally useless.
When my sister was 17, she had a friend over for dinner. Her friend was sweet but had grown up on the standard American diet of pot roast and steamed corn (or at least, what I imagine the standard American diet is - I don't actually know) The friend asked that we eat Indian food, but the moment she took a bite of chicken curry, her face turned pink and she could barely swallow.
"It's so, so spicy!" she kept wailing. She was right and wrong. There wasn't any pepper in the curry, just various masalas. But American English contains no reasonable word for masala - Hindi, on the other hand, has a thousand words for "spicy" and each of these words has a flavor and a texture. What Indian person would ever mistake mirch for masala? It's not enough to know the word - you have to be able to feel it. And there is a wall - acknowledged or not - between people who get it and people who don't.
This reality applies to other sense experiences as well. When I was a teenager working in a rural Costa Rican village, a little girl once asked me what it felt like to fly in an airplane. I gave it a shot.
"Well," I said (keep in mind, I was doing this in Spanish, which is either my second or third language depending on how you measure these things). "The plane is very big and very cold, and you put on a seatbelt. You can feel the plane rumble as it pulls away from the airport, and then the view from the window changes, and you can see the land disappear..."
And it was, as these things go, not a bad description. But even as I put it together, I was aware how incredibly paltry it was, and how it didn't even begin to answer her question.
I've flown so many times in my life that I now ask for the aisle seat as a matter of course. But I still remember being a kid and asking for the window seat every time, just to observe the land change. The view you get from the window of an airplane is singular - for most of us (not astronauts, in other words) - we will only be able to see the world in this changed and reduced form from the air.
In India, where most people still haven't taken an airplane, the most frequently requested seat is the window. In the United States, it is the aisle. And here's why: because we all know that flying for the first time means crossing a psychological barrier. Once you take an airplane, you've entered a world where it's possible to fly, and you cannot go back from that.
And this problem - this problem of describing those fundamental things - becomes ever more critical the more layers of culture and history you add to a concept. When a friend asks me to explain a Hindu wedding, what can I say that explains what it means? Nothing.
Like any traveler, I often make irritating and tired comments like "you can't get good cheese in Delhi." Is this true? That's not the point. What I do know is that I can't get that remarkable 5 lb block of white cheddar from Costco, the flavor of which is nutty, sharp, bitter and sweet all at once, and that I normally have to dig out of some flourescent-lit corner of the absolutely massive, echoing cavern that is the Costco warehouse, while my mother mulls an industrial-size jar of salsa in a nearby aisle.
Here's what I can't get in Delhi: I can't walk into my friend Robert's house for a cocktail party with college friends, take a cheese cube off a tray, bite into that familiar, comforting and fantastic flavor, and say, "Hey, did you get this at Costco?" and have him know, in an instant, what I mean. And when I say I can't get good cheese in Delhi, how much of it (if we're being honest) is really because of these second two things?
We edit these experiences and attribute them to "cultural differences," but that's another cursory and makeshift phrase. It's not a cultural difference - a cultural difference is a difference in law, cuisine or language. What I am talking about is the fundamental break in communication that occurs between two people who have different life lexicons - and that break exists even if they're speaking the same language.
I notice that Indian-Americans often tend to find it slightly easier to adjust to India than non-Indians. But it's not necessarily because we share the same life lexicon - after all, a rajma in America is a different thing from a rajma in India, although at least we've all tasted rajma before - but perhaps it does have something to do with coming from a so-called "minority culture." The practical side effect of being in the minority is that you get used to living around these gaps in life lexicon, where something that means a lot to you will still sound exotic and weird to somebody else (religion, for example...who really manages to explain that in a meaningful way? Either that moment of prayer means something to you or it doesn't, and explaining it to someone else in words is like trying to build the same house on two different foundations)
(Taken to its logical conclusion, this line of reasoning suggests that everyone has a different life lexicon. Which is true, and that is probably one of the reasons why we came up with language in the first place. I guess, as a writer, I'm so familiar with forcing words to accomplish things that I'm sometimes stunned to be reminded, forcibly, that words were originally invented as a somewhat makeshift measure, to bridge the gap between the neurons of different individuals)
Today's blog post is about language/culture. I just read a friend's blog post. She talks about how, when she first moved to the United States from India, she struggled not with words but with ideas: "Pre-liberalisation me didn't know a Reuben from a BLT, and even if I had, my knowledge of provolone was as theoretical as my knowledge of snow."
We often focus on language as the key to a culture. But that's not even half of it. I know expats in India who really hate it here, and a lot of them will say that their biggest challenge is that they don't speak the language. Which, while definitely true, is only part of the truth. When it comes to describing the fundamental experiences that network us one to the other (the taste of provolone, the feel of snow) language falls apart at the seams. If you don't get it, you just don't get it. What wears a foreigner down, eventually, is the endless stream of blank looks at words like "muffin" and "napkin" and "toilet paper," all of which go by different names.
This problem operates in two directions. I've gone into Indian restaurants in the United States and seen paneer described as follows: cubes of Indian cottage cheese. Anyone who's tasted both of these things would know that comparing paneer to cottage cheese is like comparing wood to drywall: they may occasionally serve the same purpose, but that doesn't tell you much about the nature of either wood or drywall. Which is why I always hated having to explain Indian things to my American friends. I could describe a lehenga or a dosa, but doing so deconstructed language to the point that it became fundamentally useless.
When my sister was 17, she had a friend over for dinner. Her friend was sweet but had grown up on the standard American diet of pot roast and steamed corn (or at least, what I imagine the standard American diet is - I don't actually know) The friend asked that we eat Indian food, but the moment she took a bite of chicken curry, her face turned pink and she could barely swallow.
"It's so, so spicy!" she kept wailing. She was right and wrong. There wasn't any pepper in the curry, just various masalas. But American English contains no reasonable word for masala - Hindi, on the other hand, has a thousand words for "spicy" and each of these words has a flavor and a texture. What Indian person would ever mistake mirch for masala? It's not enough to know the word - you have to be able to feel it. And there is a wall - acknowledged or not - between people who get it and people who don't.
This reality applies to other sense experiences as well. When I was a teenager working in a rural Costa Rican village, a little girl once asked me what it felt like to fly in an airplane. I gave it a shot.
"Well," I said (keep in mind, I was doing this in Spanish, which is either my second or third language depending on how you measure these things). "The plane is very big and very cold, and you put on a seatbelt. You can feel the plane rumble as it pulls away from the airport, and then the view from the window changes, and you can see the land disappear..."
And it was, as these things go, not a bad description. But even as I put it together, I was aware how incredibly paltry it was, and how it didn't even begin to answer her question.
I've flown so many times in my life that I now ask for the aisle seat as a matter of course. But I still remember being a kid and asking for the window seat every time, just to observe the land change. The view you get from the window of an airplane is singular - for most of us (not astronauts, in other words) - we will only be able to see the world in this changed and reduced form from the air.
In India, where most people still haven't taken an airplane, the most frequently requested seat is the window. In the United States, it is the aisle. And here's why: because we all know that flying for the first time means crossing a psychological barrier. Once you take an airplane, you've entered a world where it's possible to fly, and you cannot go back from that.
And this problem - this problem of describing those fundamental things - becomes ever more critical the more layers of culture and history you add to a concept. When a friend asks me to explain a Hindu wedding, what can I say that explains what it means? Nothing.
Like any traveler, I often make irritating and tired comments like "you can't get good cheese in Delhi." Is this true? That's not the point. What I do know is that I can't get that remarkable 5 lb block of white cheddar from Costco, the flavor of which is nutty, sharp, bitter and sweet all at once, and that I normally have to dig out of some flourescent-lit corner of the absolutely massive, echoing cavern that is the Costco warehouse, while my mother mulls an industrial-size jar of salsa in a nearby aisle.
Here's what I can't get in Delhi: I can't walk into my friend Robert's house for a cocktail party with college friends, take a cheese cube off a tray, bite into that familiar, comforting and fantastic flavor, and say, "Hey, did you get this at Costco?" and have him know, in an instant, what I mean. And when I say I can't get good cheese in Delhi, how much of it (if we're being honest) is really because of these second two things?
We edit these experiences and attribute them to "cultural differences," but that's another cursory and makeshift phrase. It's not a cultural difference - a cultural difference is a difference in law, cuisine or language. What I am talking about is the fundamental break in communication that occurs between two people who have different life lexicons - and that break exists even if they're speaking the same language.
I notice that Indian-Americans often tend to find it slightly easier to adjust to India than non-Indians. But it's not necessarily because we share the same life lexicon - after all, a rajma in America is a different thing from a rajma in India, although at least we've all tasted rajma before - but perhaps it does have something to do with coming from a so-called "minority culture." The practical side effect of being in the minority is that you get used to living around these gaps in life lexicon, where something that means a lot to you will still sound exotic and weird to somebody else (religion, for example...who really manages to explain that in a meaningful way? Either that moment of prayer means something to you or it doesn't, and explaining it to someone else in words is like trying to build the same house on two different foundations)
(Taken to its logical conclusion, this line of reasoning suggests that everyone has a different life lexicon. Which is true, and that is probably one of the reasons why we came up with language in the first place. I guess, as a writer, I'm so familiar with forcing words to accomplish things that I'm sometimes stunned to be reminded, forcibly, that words were originally invented as a somewhat makeshift measure, to bridge the gap between the neurons of different individuals)
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