It was a precisely a decade and three months ago that I was eagerly preparing to move to the US, back then as an MBA student, I was a tad bit too anxious to ‘fit in’ when I reached IUP at Pennsylvania. Reading the famous book ‘The Inscrutable Americans,’ added more fuel to my anxiety.
If you have lived in Bangalore (I hate calling it Bengaluru anyways) during the 2000s, you would have unmistakably seen convoys of Tata Sumo ferrying people to BPO and call centers, jokes like Americans assuming someone with named Gopi as ‘Go Pee!’ were common. Some of my friends who had a stint at BPOs have pseudo names like Roger Brown and Michele Porter. So it was only natural for me to be ready to fit in when I move there with least possible friction.
Not wanting to let down my country any further amidst the inscrutable family of Uncle Sam, I patriotically, started going to Pizza Hut, picked up fork and knife, and decided to learn their ways of eating, so that they won’t make fun of me or other desi guys; I hoped I could do my bit to help them not assume we travel in elephants to streets or have snake charming as family business.
After a month of hard work, I had mastered the art of eating with my left hand using a fork. My grandmamma would have slapped me or thrown a fit if she had seen me touch food with pointy objects, that too in my left hand. Duh, I was determined; after all, my granny is not flying to Pennsylvania. My determination saw no end in sight, I started going to Chinese places where they’d give me chopstick, with a Zen-like focus and agonizing pain in my knuckles, I learned to eat not just noodles but even fried rice using chopsticks.
There was lot more of academic stuff, which I memorized and trained myself, such as ‘don’t tip the soup cup, no elbows on the table, how to tell between the soup spoon and dessert spoon…I was just short of being an entry level butler in Buckingham Palace now.
Swoosh, the flight took off, I was in my campus, the first day of eating at the college food court. We were at ‘Fireplace’ which sold pizza by the slice, a single slice was large enough to satiate your hunger for lunch. My anxiety antennas were up, pulse raised as I astutely looked for a white blonde dude in front me buy his pizza slice; he duly paid for it and my inner voice screamed, eat it, dude, quick I want to see if I measure up to you…
But I couldn’t believe what happened next, the blonde dude garnished his pizza slice with some more cheese, spilled a few outside the plate as he did do, ground some pepper from a long wooden canister, folded the pizza slice like a how you would try to fit a hand towel into a travel pouch, threw away the Styrofoam plate and started walking as he took a bite off the slice. FML.
