Day 23

Today I met an American. Yesterday I found a Biocon shuttle that would take me from work back to my bus stop for free which I plan to utilize heavily in the coming months. No more Bangalore buses in the morning! As I waited for this shuttle this morning I saw a girl waiting at the stop that I remembered seeing on the shuttle the day before. I quickly asked her if she was waiting for the same shuttle as me and she replied yes – in unmistakable American English. I was overjoyed to have found one of my people and quickly switched back from my Indian accent and asked her where she was from, why she was here, how was she finding Bangalore, etc, etc. I found out that she had graduated from MIT and was using her year off to experience different working environments and figure out where her interests lie.

     My initial excitement gave way to unease though as I found that she had not brought a converter to use for her American appliances, had brought her American phone which would not work in India, had not been on a Bangalore bus yet and generally had no idea about anything that was going on around her after a week here. Although I admit that my Indian background gives me a huge advantage on adjusting to Indian life, I felt like her unpreparedness was a bit extreme. Now that I’ve settled into my lab, this girl represents Americans to all my coworkers and paints a rather sorry picture. The news of her arrival spread quickly (as it tends to do around here) from the main campus to my lab in Biocon Park. When it reached my ears her description went something like this: is very light-skinned, wears revealing clothes, is a typical ignorant American – she’s from MIT?        
    
     I was saddened by both the girl feeding fuel to the American stereotype as well as the Indian rumor mill’s points of emphasis – her skin tone and the college she had come from. I know plenty of Americans who are extremely worldly and would actually put in the effort to learn about a place before going there so the fact that my replacement as the token American was someone who held up all the beliefs held by native Indians about Americans was quite disappointing. Of course, if she had been completely prepared for Indian life, sensitive to the culture here (in terms of clothing), and learned a few token phrases in Hindi, there still wouldn’t have been any guarantee that she would have been accepted as a typical American. American stereotypes have a way of holding fast in Indian minds.