Many Homes, Many Wonders

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.

When I reflect upon the last ten years, I’m often stumped by the idea of home. I was born in a small, steel making town with a population of about a million – yes that is a small town in India.  I’ve made many cities my home after that and they compete for the loyalties of my heart. Yet, East Lansing and Michigan State will remain a special home for me as this is where I have spent the most amount of time outside my hometown, this is where I found my partner and this is where my formal education will end. When I do leave, this place will still remain with me.