It all began with a story my Italian friend Angelo Stagnaro told me. Stagnaro first went to India in 1989 in sweltering summer. "I thought they were joking when they said it was 55 degree Celsius outside. I didn't know thermometers could actually read the temperatures that high without exploding. I said that is impossible, my tea isn't served at 55 degree Celsius!"
Stagnaro says he felt an instant and close connection with India. How close a connection was never more evident than when Angelo stood in line on a train station in Bombay to buy a ticket. He felt a nudge. "One has to come to accept this in a country as populated as is India," says Stagnaro . "I let it go the first time without even bothering to turn around. The second jostling threw me to the floor. I'm a patient person, but being thrown to the floor in a Bombay train station was too much for me."
He swirled around to confront the head of what he calls the largest cow in all of creation. "All I could hear in my head was the voice of my 6th grade teacher, Ms. Tienda, repeating to me, 'The Hindus consider the cow to be sacred.' And all I could think of was, 'Oh, my God! They're going to kill me! I've just touched a cow!'"
Nancy Simms, chair of educational leadership at Western Carolina University, went to India and got acquainted with India's all embracing religious practices of come one come all ... and that anything goes or comes in. It was Christmas Eve 1999 and Simms was in Punchgani. She and another visitor from Canada were taken to a midnight Mass at the local Catholic church.
"There were no doors or windows in the tiny church and during the ceremonies in wandered a dog," recalls Simms. "It looked around and silently went to the back to lie down. A short time after that a goat walked up the center isle, looked around and walked out. Finally a rooster flew to the top and decided to crow around midnight. That night it seemed as if the entire world was at peace when suddenly, as the priest walked out the door there were firecrackers everywhere. I thought we were being attacked and dropped to the floor and covered my head. Imagine my embarrassment when I discovered that was usual practice."
And as far as the Indians are concerned my friend Subra Viswanathan, says on arrival he spent the first few days trying to figure out whether the shower curtain stayed inside or outside the tub and proudly did the usual desi things. “I have pictures of myself posing next to every landmark in USA."
He also recalls a friend who confused Heren with Hers and Damen with Men and went into the wrong restroom at the Schipol Airport. "And this was before gangsta. At least Damen now could be da men," says Viswanathan.
Viswanathan recalls his American manager asking him if he went to work on an elephant in India. "I told her my grand dad used to, but now we had a car."
Viswanathan says once when a colleague's cat died and she went into mourning, crying a lot, "a fellow FOB (fresh off the boat) guy from our group, judging by her reaction, thought her Dad died and sent her condolences... Talk about embarrassment."
Viswanathan and his colleagues would try to befriend every Indian they encountered. "You know, big wide grin, me Bombay et tu? etc, till you learn to spot the 'How the hell did you get here? Of course in later years, we did try desperately to be American, till our kids were born! Then we spent most of our time trying desperately to be more Indian than Gandhi."
Jagdish Sheth, maverick marketing guru and author, recalls arriving in New York and looking at the humungous Sunday paper and protesting to the newsagent, "I want only one copy."
Told that it was only one copy, he preserved it for weeks trying to figure out its salvage value, because in India one traded old clothes and big bundles of newspapers for steel utensils. He once tried to haggle down the price of a shirt at a department store, warning the sales clerk, "My friend is waiting outside. I have only $3, take it or leave it!"
Sheth was a financially strapped student when he married his wife Madhu. Every one chipped in to help the poor student marry and he was given access to the famous Hines Chapel for the wedding. But there was a hitch. "In Hines Chapel the key problem was how to set up the holy fire for the wedding ceremony. They said no holy fire permitted, there is no sprinkler system there. We compromised. We went around the Chapel grill instead! It was a landmark wedding!"
Another friend, Kishore Ramchandran, a computer science professor, came as a post graduate student to Wisconsin, with visions of hot babes and fast cars, thanks to James Hadley Chase novels and the sparse Hollywood movies playing in Indian theatres in the 1970s that riveted him back home. He discovered instead that cows were the flavor of his mid western town.
Ramchandran says it took time for him to adjust to the camaraderie between professors and students. He recalls an orientation session for teaching assistants by a professor who was being aided by a little guy in shorts handing out papers. "We were pretty much ignoring him, thinking he was her son, when she pointed to him and said, 'Let me introduce Professor Charlie Fisher to you,' and our jaws dropped. We are not used to such familiarity back home."
Ramchandran also had to acclimatize himself to American English terminology. He was once waiting for a senior professor who was meeting with a teaching assistant. "When he came out, I asked him. 'Is Angie free?' The assistant lowered his voice and said, 'She is not free, but she is relatively inexpensive.'"
My mom Suman and her friend Pushpa Narula were both married to army generals when they took their flight out of the country to visit the United States for the first of several times.
While mom had been to neighboring Afghanistan, as the wife of a military attache, her friend had not done even that, so an international trip was quite an event for both of them.
What enamored them most here was the freedom of doing as they pleased.
They did crazy things like putting henna in their hair, and for want of authentic shower caps, wrapping grocery bags around their heads and merrily going for a walk in their new heady contraptions.
"Do you think people will mind?" asked mom
"Who knows we are the wives of generals?" retorted her friend.
To while the hours in between the application and the shampooing of henna, they proceeded to shop for a watch at an Iranian store. After they had been haggling in typical Indian style over the price for more than a few very long minutes, the Iranian guy turned and muttered to his wife in Persian, "These women are Indian and just like us they will haggle and argue and not buy a darned thing". Mom whose stint in Afghanistan had honed her fluency in Persian, retorted in equally fluent Persian,” If you give us this $40 dollar watch for $13, which is really the right price, we will buy it."
The two then proceeded to take the ferry ride to the Statue of Liberty, but having paid the princely sum of 25 cents for the ride, the frugal women decided to stretch the quarter and would at the end of each trip follow the herd to leave the boat, but right at the exit, would stealthily turn around and mingle with the incoming crowd. They beamed with pride at their innovative skills for riding the crest seven times in a row and the quarter was a quarter well spent.
Umesh Rathie, an engineer from India, came to the United States over two decades ago as a consultant. Rathie soon realized, however, that intellectual skills don't automatically equip you to understand the ways of the American world!
On his first day at work, Rathie meticulously arranged his table, got the stationary, the pencil, the pen, and then went to the secretary and asked, "I don't have any rubber. Where can I get a rubber?"
The secretary looked aghast: "You need a rubber? in office, during office hours?"
He responded, "Well obviously, I need to use it during office hours sometimes."
The secretary looked at him sternly, "Let me tell you something and don't you forget it, never ask a lady for a rubber and in future buy your own."
"I discovered later, what we..er.. call rubber in India is called an eraser here!"

Rathie also recalls another hilarious incident when he accompanied his Gujarati manager in South Carolina to McDonald's. His colleague asked a waitress in his heavy Gujrati-Indian accent, "I want large fries and a large Coke" Because of his accent, the coke sounded like something that rhymes with sock . The woman eyeballed him for one long, piercing moment and said with a straight face, "Man I don't know about you, but aah am lookin for one ma self."
Rathie and his colleagues also discovered the joys of driving a car on the highway and parking in the multi deck parking garages. In Detroit some of his friends from Tata-Unisys, came to work on a project and parked their car on the third floor. When they left after work, instead of putting the gear in reverse they pushed the accelerator and sailed forth. The headlines in the next day's newspapers heralded the arrival of the "Flying Tatas."
Someone rightly said, the point of going somewhere is not to see the most spectacular, but to get a feel for the fringes and hollows in which life is lived. Each one of us needs to venture, not just to revel or achieve in something glimpsed in a seemingly distant universe, or seek and conquer new horizons that beckon, but also as Thoreau rightly said, sometimes just "to witness our limits transgressed.

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