Disclaimer (July 2016) - When I read this post now, I sound judgey...not my proudest post on the blog. I guess I've grown a bit more mature and tolerant now. Everyone has their story....let's not judge them...but it applies both ways.
Have there been times in your life when someone was extremely rude to you and you were just too dumb-sruck to retaliate their rudeness? I've got plenty of such incidents in my own biograophy.
A few days back I went volunteering at a place in town. This is a huge non-profit and hence has a lot of volunteers working for them part-time. As it happened an elderly lady (app. 55 - 60 yrs) and I ended up doing some stuff together in the office. I tried to start a conversation with her. As the conversation progressed, I realized she was a unhappy kinda person. May be life was not exactly fair to her, but I felt it wasn't unfair to her either. Anyways, I told her why I normally volunteer and where my husband is employed(in an American-Indian IT services company) etc. After a few minutes she said that one of her friends was worried about losing her job because her work was being outsourced to, you guessed it right, India. And she said, "I hope it's not the company your spouse works for". For a few seconds I was stupefied! I was too shocked for her way of expressing dislike for "Indian companies stealing their jobs": saying it in the face of a stranger from India who was happy to volunteer her time, for free,at an American non-profit. I didn't think it was fair of her to be so direct, especially with a person she met just an hour ago. But I din't utter a word back to her. Later, I was so angry with myself for not coming up with a good response.
And then as time passed by she asked me strange questions about Indian culture: how she thought people in India force their kids for arranged marriages, how she thought we can't speak English and how people normally live with their parents. Here I took matters into my hand and explained the reality in India: how parents now-a-days trust their children to make their own decisions life partner or otherwise, how 80% Indians have their entire education from English medium schools, how we in India respect family and stick together till death.
It was also shocking to see her recalculating the money she "loaned" to her sons! You know your life is a reflection of your actions, if you are calculative in lending money to your kids they expect you to live in a nursing home later in life. I'm not saying that people here are all like this. I've mets of tons of people here who take care of their parents in a better way than I've ever seen in India.
Relationships work only when love and respect are requited. And that's why the Indian family system works in my opinion. At the end of the day I just felt sorry for the dear old ladie, for it's her attitude, and not her pay at job or not her retirement benefits, that needs to change in order for her to be happy and peaceful in life. And I'm glad I am in a position to make this discretion.
