Cultural Exchange

Today while training, we got sidetracked a bit by talking about Indian and Canadian everyday stuff. It started when I asked the guys to write the correct spellings of their names for me so that I could send them on to Brian to create AV email accounts. Chandrashekar wrote his name in English and then I asked him to write it in his native language script. I knew from the presentation by the SSS VP that there are more than 10 different scripts in India, and I was curious to see how they looked written by hand. Chandrashekar’s mother tongue is Telugu, so he wrote it in that script first. It's really beautiful and when he's writing, his motions are as if he's doing calligraphy. Hindi is the national language (learned in order communicate across India), so everyone can converse, read, and write in Hindi in addition to their mother tongue. Chandrashekar wrote his name in Hindi below the Telugu and it's a completely different character set.

Shirish’s mother tongue is Marathi whose script is very similar to Hindi, so he wrote his name for me in Hindi only. Bhaskaran is from Tamil Nadu, which is in the very southern tip of India, so his mother tongue is Tamil. Again, the Tamil and Hindi scripts are very different from each other. All of them are so pretty. I tried to take a picture of the notebook pages they wrote on, but it's a little hard to make out (see album here).

This conversation led to many ignorant questions from me about schooling, work, and social structure in India. They sweetly humoured me, and this is what I learned:

School

Children start some type of schooling when they are 2 years old. The divisions are as follows:

• 2 years old: Play Group
• 2 ½ years old: Nursery
• 3 ½ years old: Lower KG (Kindergarten?)
• 4 ½ years old: Upper KG
• 5 ½ years: 1st Standard (Primary School)
• 6 ½ years: 2nd Standard
• 7 ½ years: 3rd Standard
• 8 ½ years: 4th Standard
• 9 ½ years: 5th Standard (High School)
• 10 ½ years: 6th Standard
• 11 ½ years: 7th Standard
• 12 ½ years: 8th Standard
• 13 ½ years: 9th Standard
• 14 ½ years: 10th Standard
• 15 ½ years: 11th Standard (Intermediate School)
• 16 ½ years: 12th Standard

Intermediate School is like junior college in the States or CEGEP in Quebec. You have to choose a major (i.e. medicine, engineering, commerce, civil service, etc.). All engineering students, regardless of specialty (chemical, civil, electrical, computer, etc.) have to learn about computers and know at least one programming language. After Intermediate School is university. You can earn a Bachelor’s degree in 3 or4 years, just like in Canada. 60% of the workers at a company like SSS will have a Bachelor’s degree; 30-40% will have a Masters (!). Children living in a city like Pune will attend private schools all the way through their education. In less prosperous areas, more government (public) schools are available and well attended.

Caste system and education/employment

There are approximately 130 castes in India. The caste system is at least a thousand years old and is based on occupation. So, in general, people who have the same occupation are in the same caste. Your caste is determined by the occupation of your ancestors from ages ago. When you are born, you get a caste certificate, similar to a birth certificate. Like a birth certificate, it’s a document that stays with you your whole life and does not change.

Admission to schools as well as employment depends on your caste and sex. Equal opportunity measures have been put into place, so at any given school/job, 30% of positions are reserved for women, 20% for SC (Scheduled Castes), 20% for ST (Scheduled Tribes), 20% for OBC (Other Backward Classes). SC, ST, and OBC are castes that are viewed as lower level.

Marriage/Children

If your parents agree, you may marry someone outside your caste, but this is unusual (they think 0.1%). Children from the marriage will inherit their father’s caste. When you are born, you are given a first name, but your middle and last names come from your father (e.g., my name would be Kaori Hiroshi Furue). As a woman, when you get married, you take your husband’s names. So, my name would be have been changed upon marriage to Kaori Darcy Fiander. Men have the same name their whole lives.

If as a couple, you have only one child and that child is female (and you cannot have more children – sterile, etc.), the government will pay for your daughter’s education and they’ll give you 10,000 rupees. This is only for families with one girl child. If you have two, you do not qualify.

Work and Family

Family is very important in India. Unlike in North America where we have mostly nuclear families (parents and kids), in India parents, kids, grandparents, and inlaws frequently live together. Because of this, daycare is not very common. Usually, grandparents or other family are available to care for the family's children. In addition, since women are the primary caregivers, in the workplace it is understood they can only work from 10-5 because they have to take care of their children.

Only in IT-related fields do people work Monday-Friday with weekends off. In most occuptations, everyone works 6 days/week. In manufacturing, they have Thursdays off because there is no power on Thursdays (a conservation measure, maybe?). In government, they have Sundays off. Someone like our cab driver works 7 days/week and is on call 24/7. Shirish says there is no part time work in India. People work a minimum of 8 hours per day, but most work more.

In turn, Chandrashekar had lots of questions about Canada, including the cost of living (housing, transportation, gas, food), vegetation, regional differences, weather, etc. I'm always amazed to meet people who are interested in Canada because it seems so dull to me in comparison, but as much as I think it's different and interesting here, they must feel the same way to some extent.

This morning I was seriously hung over from all the carbs and deep-fried food we had yesterday. I ended up having only cubes of watermelon and mineral water for breakfast, so no photo today. We went to a new place for lunch though. It was a restaurant inside an apartment hotel called Seasons. It was a Indian/Chinese buffet and they had lots of salad and lighter food, so that was a relief. I started with a clear vegetarian soup with garlic, bok choy, carrots, and cauliflower. Marcelo has a the lightest cream of chicken soup in the world. It was really chicken broth with a teaspoon of cream and some shredded chicken. At the buffet, I had: cucumber corn salad, egg and pineapple salad (classic, creamy egg salad with pineapple in it), raw carrots, raw cucumber, raita (yogurt salad), murg lahori (chicken), Mexican eggplant (eggplant slices with tomato and peas), adraki paneer tikka (cottage cheese), dal palak (lentil and spinach), veg hakka noodle (chow mein-like thing), batata song (potato), and methi mutter malai (creamy peas and fenugreek). And we had naan on the side, of course. All the curries were yummy. I really enjoyed the egg and pineapple salad. Since this is what we do now, we had dessert too. I had mud cake (dark chocolate square), fruit tart (chocolate-filled pastry shell with whipped cream, fresh fig, plum, kiwi, and pineapple on top), strawberry mousse, and an anonymous 'Indian sweet' that was like a small piece of sponge cake soaked in rose water. The mud cake reminded us both exactly of Duncan Hines chocolate cake.

We declared victory over bundles finally. Tomorrow is Venue Config and Legends. There is only so much you can take in, so I think we're going at a good pace. I really want to finish all the content by Friday though.

Something that Marcelo tuned me into was North American TV shows dubbed in Hindi (I think). So far, Marcelo has watched Scooby Doo, Mr. Bean, and Full House. Tonight, Sylvester and Tweety was on, so I took a little video snippet so you all could watch too. I think Speedy Gonzales is speaking Hindi with a Mexican accent. To see the video, click here.

We had dinner in the hotel at Dhaba again. It's an excellent place and a lot of locals come to eat there too. With the light breakfast and semi-light lunch, I was ready for the buffet. So, I had chicken kabab, paneer achari, subz makhani, sum aloo punjab, sarson da saag, dal pancharatna, steamed rice, and buttered naan. For dessert, the chef insisted we try the gulab jamun. He said it's made by boiling and stirring milk for a long time, cooling it, making a paste, rolling it into balls, deep-frying it, and then soaking it in rose water syrup. It was like a really good Timbit...in rose water syrup.

Tonight, for some reason, my Internet connection wasn't working. I told the Front Desk and they said they'd send someone up (it was 10PM). I was thinking, "What, do they have system administrators working around the clock?" So, a few minutes later, two IT guys came to my room, fiddled around, and fixed it for me. Wild.

A very exciting piece of news is that we are all booked for our weekend visit to the Ajanta and Ellora caves. We'll be leaving on Saturday morning, seeing the caves, and staying overnight at the Taj Aurangabad. Check it out! I'm SO drinking beside the pool.

Well, I'm spent as usual. Goodnight everyone and until tomorrow...