We celebrate our diversity and the fact that we are a contrary of multiple realities, often contradictory to one another. And that we live across those realities and the ambiguity that comes with the territory. And it's easy to paint the Western world in one hue of grey, particularly the US, viewing it as a whole, forming opinions and delivering judgements as a single entity. Listen to a few conversations, specially over dinner or pub tables, and its easy to see this pattern emerge.
Not that 4 weeks spent in the US over 3 years makes me any kind of expert, but I am beginning to realise how wrong we are. It's an incredibly vast country, literally, and with more ethnic diversity that we can imagine. Both the geography and the ethnic inflow of people segments the entire country into so many tiny pieces that to even try and stitch them up together is a task of immense and complex proportions. Unlike India, at least they speak a common language (at least, most of them do) but the feeling that you move into a different country as you visit different parts is pretty similar to what we feel here. At a surface level, you see it being reflected in mannerisms, accents, clothes, expressions. Behaviors too change, especially the warmth factor towards immigrants and foreigners. Opinions and knowledge base also vary vastly, evident in the quality of conversations I heard in Chicago vs Atlanta vs San Francisco on the latest topic of the Bin Laden killing.
It's also extremely interesting to think about how this country was truly "built" and the enormous wealth generated, considering the size, complexity and the multiple moving parts. The ongoing debate on immigration reform and the current floods crisis, while very different topics, both give us a glimpse into some of that journey....the heavy inflow of immigration and the various uses it was put to as well as the conscious, deliberate planning that has gone into each town and all farmland.
And what did that journey imply for the individual today? Relatively higher freedom at a social level (which itself varies depending on whether you are in a small town in the mid west or a city on the east coast) is coupled with an array of rules and guidelines governing behavior on a day to day basis. Not everyone conforms to this obviously and that's where the interesting stories lie too.
The colors are more muted, the drama a little lesser, the development much more, the wealth much much more. But the tragi-comedy of the vibrant, expressive, mostly ambitious society of the US is more similar to India than we, or at least I, have thought so far.