Jim Stuff

India 19 - Hmmmm

This place is different!

• Starbucks – there is so much room in the stores!
• There are no flies buzzing around the pastry counter!
• No car beeping (horns) when the light turns green – how do the cars know it’s time to go (yet they do)?
• Cars are sooo big!!
• Cars go sooo fast!!
• Highways are sooo wide!!
• I Have not had the courage to go into the super-Safeway by our house yet! Not sure what I’ll do with all that food around. (I never saw a store larger than a 7-11 in India. Most are very small and it appears people just shop every day).
• I never saw anything in India that compares to a drug store here. All shops were very uni-functional. Medical shop has only medicines. Food shop has only food. Personal care shop has only hygiene care products. Most shops have a counter you walk up to that is street facing and they go retrieve what you ask for. You may recall the electronics store snap I posted. That store is twice as big as almost every other store with which I interacted.
• I keep hearing people say cell phones and I’m not sure what they are talking about – could they mean their ‘mobile’?
• Where are all the people? I have not seen anyone crossing the street in the middle of rush-hour traffic?
• Clean – glorious clean. I used to lament at the garbage I’d see on the side of the freeway on the way to work. Well, I still don’t like it, but what we have is sooo much cleaner than what I observed overseas.
• Coffee cups are so amazingly big here!!
• Cows – who kidnapped all the cows? I have not seen one since getting back.
• Stray dogs – what happened to the poor stray dogs!! Have they all been deported to India?
• Smells! Let’s just not go there! Nice to be home.
• The company at which I work has an Engineering Dept with a 75% Indian makeup. So In many ways I feel like I’m just in another part of India (the part with big cars, big roads, big stores, no cows, no stray dogs, no smells, no flies, no beeping cars, and actual grocery stores) – Hmmm, I guess that’s called Silicon Valley!
• Why am I yearning to see a Cricket match? Who won the World Cricket cup (India got eliminated, did Australia ‘the arch rival’ go all the way)? Did Dhoni get the most valuable Bowler award? Sheesh, I can’t find out anything on American news!
• Ahhhhh. Diet Pepsi. Say no more.
• It is interesting to me. In the US we really do have so much variety in everything. Take soda for instance. Walk into a grocery store and you have 20-30 different soda brands/flavors to pick from. In India, I never saw more than 5-7 in any one place. Usually it was 3 (pepsi, 7-up, Orange). How can the US market which has a quarter of the consumers (compared to India) support so much stuff!! We really are a nation of consumers!!
  

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not knocking the landscape which makes up India or the US. Each has its own personality and that’s what makes each different. It’s just that they are VERY different!

I was a visitor in India so I did not have to deal with the day to day issues of running a household, etc. But it is surprising how quickly I have snapped back into consumer/producer mode back in the US.

When I was young, I’d hear older folk say ‘time goes so fast’. I never understood that saying until – well, I got older! Now, yes, time does go fast. Another saying that is living out in my mind now is ‘it seems so long ago even though it was just yesterday’. How does that happen?

Was I really on the other side of the globe?

posted by Winya @ 10:30 AM