Flipping through my
passport recently, I came across the first stamp on it – New York, August 24,
2004. Ten years of my life had zipped by in the USA. One-seventh of an average
human’s life expectancy. Since I had subsisted on a student diet of pizza and
ramen noodles for much of those ten years, you might reasonably argue that ten
years was a much bigger chunk of MY life expectancy. In any case, I digress. A decade is a sizable
increment of time to immerse in any society, allow it to wash over you and
emerge scrubbed clean of your old prejudices in some areas and entangled with the
weeds of new ideas and debates in others. It also allows you to dispense sage advice
and write introspective essays without coming off as too full of yourself.
In August 2004, I came
to a New England liberal arts college as a foreign student from India,
immaculately dressed and carrying travelers checks in a secret inner vest pocket,
with little clue about New England people or its winters. When greeted by the
customary “How are you?” or “What’s up?”, I often launched into an existential
soliloquy, only to be met by a polite but nonplussed “Ah, ok” at best, or people
walking off at worst. Comparing this casual acknowledgment of strangers to the
cultivated indifference in bustling public spaces in urban India, I realized
that the latter was a function of a much higher density of people. This theory
was confirmed in my first visit to Manhattan, where no one cared how I was as
long as I didn’t stand around, gawking at skyscrapers and obstructing their
path of least resistance on the sidewalk.
When I did get past the
initial greetings, I was struck by the uniquely American notion of a private
bubble. Standing in a queue might be a cherished British institution; standing
in a line with five feet of space between one person and the next in is
decidedly American. I became so accustomed to giving people their space in
cafeterias lines, when I went to a supermarket in my hometown, three people
shoved their carts in front of me thinking I was still grocery shopping. My
father, clearly exasperated, shook his head and sighed, “Son, you’ve lost the
competitive spirit”. He had reason to express similar sentiments the next time
I was driving, often letting people cut in while I was intent on following
rules and norms that outlived their usefulness in the Indian context. Today,
when I look back at these experiences as a student of economics, I understand
that the rule-bound driving in the US and apparently lawless driving in India
are both equilibrium outcomes, with drivers responding optimally to their
enforcement environments. Indeed, driving with the US code increases your chances of being in an accident in India, given that
others don’t change their behavior!
As I transitioned from
my undergraduate experience in New England to a master’s program in Chicago, I
began to recognize the variation in culture, society and weather within the US,
fine-tuning the instinctive reflex to compare it to India. Living in South Side
Chicago, I began to appreciate the stark spatial and visual differences in
neighborhoods across that immense and spectacular city. Chicago, perhaps
because of its long and brutal winter, invited its residents to experience its
downtown in magnificent public parks, fountains, lakeside trails and sidewalk
seating restaurants. Just a few miles away, South Side Chicago remained an
industrial wasteland with large, barren tracts of vacant lots and unoccupied
buildings, foreshadowing what I came to observe in Detroit later. To my Indian eye,
empty neighborhoods and a shrinking big city made no sense. In India and much
of the developing world, the metropolitan perimeter is forever expanding, with
rural migrants living on the fringes of the city and its laws, yet being
completely visible by supplying their labor in the homes, offices and streets
of cities.
Coming from Chicago to
East Lansing, I experienced discontinuities in both my formal and informal
education, i.e. American sports. On one hand, I transitioned from being a
consumer to producer of knowledge and have now covered the spectrum of higher
education from a small liberal arts college to a medium-sized private
institution to a large research based public university. On the other hand, I
went from a school which was the national champion in squash (many
Midwesterners have asked me how a winter pumpkin can be played) to a school
with no football team, to MSU, with its near fanatical fervor for Spartan
football and basketball. After many years of avoiding anything to do with
American football which contrasted wildly with genteel, no contact cricket, my
first love, I cheered myself hoarse at the 2011 Wisconsin game which MSU won
with a Hail Mary pass – my life had changed forever. When I found myself
explaining what a tailgate is to new international students this year, I
realized how ingrained MSU’s sporting culture had become for me.
While East Lansing is
where I have immersed myself in research and college sport, it is also the
place where I have met some of my closest friends and the love of my life, my
wife Meenakshi, also a graduate student. We can never be too grateful to the
friends who introduced us, acted as our support systems and literally connected
us, driving us on snowy days when waiting for the CATA bus was not an
attractive proposition. Recently, we were married in a backyard ceremony
officiated by my first East Lansing roommate, surrounded by friends, colleagues
and advisers who have been nothing but kind and generous to us.
