It's All About the Culture Clash. Well, Mostly.

Whenever I write something negative about India I struggle with whether I should write something positive too. To provide balance. To strive to see the positive. To make space for all the good I did experience that doesn’t sit at the front of my mind, and for all the good that surely exists that I don’t know and couldn’t see from 4 months of living as a foreigner in its most mega megalopolis. What I realize now is that much of what I write about is driven by culture clash. The intense feelings I had when my American culture hit Indian culture.

I see India through a lens, for sure, and the main tint of that lens is my Americanness. My culture prizes direct communication and, at its outer layers anyway, treating people with equality. Much of the focus of my writing here, and a major driver of my experience in India, is the culture clash I experienced: trying to understand what people were really saying when they spoke because the subtext was so nuanced and difficult truths were never actually said out loud but expressed in other ways, trying not to be shamed because I was a woman alone and by virtue of that was supposed to be, etc...

I’m sure there are many good things to say about India but, here’s the thing, I don’t have them to say right now. What stood out for me was the hardness of cultures colliding and the unfairness of major aspects of Indian culture, viewed, of course, from an American-centric point of view. 

What I have said here has very much been from a place of feeling. How I felt when my culture hit India’s culture. I haven’t gotten to a more objective place yet and I think that’s fine. What I write is very valid in that it accurately represents layers of my experience but, at least at this point, those layers are still very much about the challenges of two cultures colliding.

India, a Colorful Scar

A friend asked me about India today. I half jokingly told her I was scarred and didn’t want to talk about it. Lately whenever someone asks me about my time there I smile wryly and say it was “colorful”, daring them to continue their questioning. They usually take the hint that I’d rather discuss something else, which is good because nearly 2 months after returning I’m still overwhelmed and saddened by what I experienced and not ready to revisit it. I hope someday I can think about India again because there is a lot left for me to learn from and share about my experiences there.

I was Skyping with my friend Shoshana last night, a Canadian who lived in New Delhi for roughly the same period of time I did and who became a dear friend, riding the ups and downs of life there with me. She too has a blog about her time in India and has much left to write about but can’t seem to get started. Maybe she is afraid to go back there too.

While I don’t want to revisit India, literally or figuratively, anytime soon, I also get frustrated with Westerners who think they understand what it is like to live there – especially in New Delhi – a city most Indians find hard to live in - because they have a friend who visited the Taj or a co-worker who grew up in Kerala.

I talked with one such woman today. She seemed generally likable; outgoing, cheery and genuinely interested in me. Had our conversation started off better I probably would have liked to talked with her more, but when she responded to my sharing that I lived in India for 4 months with a shrug, as if to say “that doesn’t seem too hard”, I got mad and lost interest.

Mad because she thinks she knows what that means but she doesn’t. Mad because I’m left with this weight from my experience in India – a weight I haven’t figured out how to transmute into something good yet – and I just got dismissed by a woman who thinks she understands that. Mad because there are people who have no real sense of the human suffering in the world and no sense of responsibility for it. It doesn’t figure into their worldview in any substantial way and, truthfully, that makes me feel scared for the future and lonely on my chosen path.

I want it both ways. I want to know what I know from my time in India but I don’t want the psychological and philosophical burden of that knowledge, of the witnessing of mass human suffering, extreme poverty, profound sexism and soul-shaking human inequality.

I feel mad because I am clinging to my life back in the U.S. but part of me thinks I don’t deserve the solace of it. I’m uncomfortable with my privilege but certainly not ready to relinquish it. I have a feeling that mine is a pretty normal reintegration process and that I’ll always have some sadness in my heart about India. I do hope I find a way to turn it into something useful though.