100 Reasons I love America: Space, Silence & More!
#51: Space
I mean this literally. There is just more space in America. The US is almost 4 times as big as India. There is just more vista for our eyes to rest on and take a break. Every square inch of land is not dotted by human beings. I used to miss the dots for a very long time. I am finally at a place in my life where I don’t mind not seeing the dots blend into a chaos of sounds and colors. Less chaos is ok. One of my American colleagues observed: “People stand almost touching elbows in the elevators and that seems like a normal thing to do in India” :)
#52: Silence
Following a similar theme, I am getting more accustomed to and sometimes even welcome silence nowadays. India is almost 4 times more populous than America which means 4 times as many people that might be adding their sound bytes to fight silence. My initial days in this country startled me by the silence with which it surrounded and smothered me. Where were the people? Where were sounds of human life? As I age, I am beginning to feel less lonely with silence and appreciating solitude more in this country. Silence can be a good thing.
#53: Self-expression
The American society appreciates self-expression and identity way more than the Indian society does. Yes, even in 2015.
#54 Safety
A few years after I had arrived on American shores to study for my Masters, my friends and I decided to go skiing. We went down an intermediate slope, no helmets, no training whatsoever in the night. There was this moment in the middle of that slope where I just froze. People around me were assuredly zipping past and I had palpitations: how would I make it to the bottom in one piece? What an incredibly stupid thing to do! It’s not like American kids don’t pull off crazy stunts. They do. They just know what they are getting into and they know how to be safe if they chose to be safe. The difference was I just did not know and did not think what I had attempted was dangerous. We were not big on safety or safety gear when I grew up in India. If something was considered unsafe, we just avoided it. If something was safe, it was an ok thing to do. The gaping hole with the question, “What if you wanted to try something that might be safe if you prepare well - was never answered.”
#55 Niche!
I love how there is a way to explore and deep dive into anything you are passionate about, in America, no matter how long tailed it might be. There are always these little stores and meet up groups and communities of people who just know the place to go to, just the thing to buy to satisfy your curiosity. Like the time I decided to go looking for non-toxic, green carpet sealant, zero VOC paints, laminate floors with glues/sealants that don’t offgas, substitutes for animal milk and so on :p
#56 Inferior Jobs
If you belong to a middle or upper-middle class family in India, there are a category of jobs that you just will not be doing. These jobs are not what kids from a ‘respectable’, middle-class family do. You wouldn’t babysit and earn money, you wouldn’t wait tables in a restaurant, you would not earn quick cash by doing housework and chores for other people. I like how these invisible yet widely-understood classifications don’t exist in this society and how kids are expected to put in hard work and earn money and thus realize just how much effort is involved in the conversion.
#57 Returned Goods
This is such a trivial thing but yet not. There is no concept of returning purchased goods in India (for the most part). The pain-free return shipping of goods purchased in error is not something that would apply to mainstream India. And yet, it is a minor happiness boost to be able to do that and not deal with the little guilt that you have spent good money over a perfectly unusable product.
#58 Mechanical Tasks
America is such a well-oiled machine for the most part. I enjoy its mechanics. How, once you are in the system, things just work whether it’s buying a house, opening a bank account, cancelling a credit card or paying an electric bill. There is no money under the table, no sweet-talking a senior official to push your request through, no red-tapism and no nepotism. No squeaky wheels to worry about. They just roll along smoothly and allow us to move along with life.
#59 Civic Sense
The thing I have noticed about most people in India is how particular they are about cleaning up the inside of their homes but are yet able to blot out the filth that stays put on the roads outside. Having grown up in India, I can try to answer my own question — India is so congested and there are so many people, even if one person choses to be more conscious of his civic sense, it will eventually add up and make a difference. True. Only, the eventually will take forever to arrive given there are a billion plus other people who need to buy into this philosophy of cleanliness. It is a difficult problem to solve and a problem that does not exist in America (again, for the most part).
#60 Taboo Topics!
No one talked to me about the ‘Birds and the Bees’ or ‘Good Touch and Bad Touch’ or about ‘Not talking to Strangers’. My parents instead hovered around me with God-like effort and time spent on parenting to make sure we were safe. They chose to parent us in a bubble instead of touching upon uncomfortable topics. As you can imagine, I have encountered life mostly-dazed-and-open-mouthed because I just wasn’t aware…of many many things! We were the typical ‘Throw a penny/paisa under the sofa and ask your kids to search for it when kissing scenes show up in the movie’ type of family. I see America is not like that. One day, my kids will be exclaiming, “You mean you never had to have this awkward talk with your parents when you were a kid? That’s not fair!”
Right.
(Looking for reasons #1 to #50 I love America as an immigrant?)
