Gori Girl

We had a simple, festive Diwali this year. After getting home from work, Aditya and I immediately set about following a Bengali family tradition. Fourteen candles (diya in Hindi, prodip in Bengali) were lit in honor of fourteen ancestors – seven from your mother’s side, and seven from your father’s side – while we each took a moment to silently think over the things that our families have done for us to help us be the people we are today. After a few moments of prayer and appreciation of the glow of the candles inside, we took them outside so that the rest of our neighborhood could enjoy their light as well.

Friday Connections: a time when I give links and a bit of commentary to things I’d blog about if I had the time. This week there’s just two categories: random India-related articles and vodka the Russian way. Because I’m all about multicultural celebration traditions, especially on Fridays after a long week.

As most of you know, Diwali, the festival of lights, is upon us. I really love Diwali as a holiday – like Thanksgiving, it seems like a celebration we can all get something out of, regardless of our faiths or lack thereof. Focusing on light in our lives already in our lives, our thanks for the people who have helped us get to our current state of knowledge and happiness, and our wishes for increased light and good in a world is something I think everyone can get behind.

My first international trip occurred when I was four – we took a ferry to Victoria, Canada from Seattle during a Christmas vacation. I have only three hazy memories from that trip: shivering on the ferry from winter weather so unlike balmy California, walking along some cobblestone streets, and marveling at the snow and woolly mammoths.

In retrospect, I believe the woolly mammoth was behind glass at the Royal British Columbia Museum, but for years I informed people that Canada had weird streets, snow, and woolly mammoths.

By the time I met Aditya I’d had the chance to live abroad in Germany and travel around Europe and Mexico, so I was about as well prepared for a trip to India as anyone can be. Before that first departure, I was remember reading books on travel and India fervently in an effort to make my trip there – and the Hindu wedding Aditya and I would have – more enjoyable and stress-free. Most of the advice I found was garbage, to be honest – Aditya and I had a lot of laughs at the expense of writers who seemed to think that India was entirely composed of only squalor and spirituality, instead of, you know, regular folks living their lives. However, one short quotation I came across prior to that trip still stands out to me – it was great travel advice, especially for someone on her way to her wedding:

A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it. – John Steinbeck

Traveling anywhere means leaving the familiar where we’re comfortable and in control – to a large extent, that’s the purpose of travel. And so giving up control, and allowing India to be a shock to my (very Americanized) system ended up being half the fun.

One thing I love about living in California is that the area is not just diverse – many parts of the US have racial and cultural diversity – but that the area has been diverse for such a long time. From the Punjabi-Mexicans of Yuba City to the Gosei generation of the Japanese-Americans, this area has had, and continues to have both a striking ability to maintain important pieces of cultural continuity of immigrant groups and a high degree of intermarriage and mixed-race kids. As I walk down the streets of San Francisco everyday, I’m struck by the number of people who look like they could have very diverse backgrounds.

Which brings me to the main topic of the day – the future of mixed-race-ness. You may have run across this idea before – that, in the future, we’re all going to be some beige color

This is the sixth post from my ten question series on questions and discussions that are particularly important for intercultural or interracial couples to have. All of the posts from this series can be found on the series index, The Ten Questions Every Intercultural Couple Should Discuss.

Home. It’s the place where you should feel comfortable, accepted, and loved. Where you should feel perfectly free to just be yourself – and the same is also true for your partner. However, since intercultural couples often grow up in very different homes, how you picture home and how your partner pictures home may be two very different things. In order for you both to feel comfortable and “at home”, you’re going to need to talk about what sort of mixed culture at home you want to create.

Friday Connections: a time when I give links and a bit of commentary to things I’d blog about if I had the time. This week the categories are three perspectives on “Do-It-Yourself Foreign Aid”, two in-depth profiles of extra-ordinary men, and a crazy number of “gori blogs” that I’ve been finding and catching up on – still more to go!

In the process of packing up and shipping all of my office files, notebooks, computer equipment and such from Virginia to San Francisco, I noticed that a few Indian accessories have crept into my desk knick-knacks over the years. In celebration of completely unpacking all of my office stuff (fist pump!), I thought I’d share some snaps of the various items with you guys. We have plenty of Indian accessories at home, too – you can expect a celebration post for finishing unpacking the house in maybe five or six months…

This is the fifth post from my ten question series on questions and discussions that are particularly important for intercultural or interracial couples to have. All of the posts from this series can be found on the series index, The Ten Questions Every Intercultural Couple Should Discuss.

A few days after moving into our new home in Silicon Valley, Aditya and I sat down to figure out what household items and furniture we would purchase to replace things sold or given away back in DC. Aditya’s list was about six lines: three electronics of some sort, trash bags, trash cans, and “food”. Mine was a little over two pages – typed.

After Aditya recovered from the stupefaction induced by seeing my list, he started to give me a mathematics lesson – specifically, how the dollar value of the items on my list was a number much larger than the value in our bank account. It was a fascinating lesson, but, in the interests of time, I interrupted him to explain that my list was created with the expectation that we’d only be getting some of the things – we just had to figure out what we both agreed were the most important. In other words, it was a classic “Asker” list.

Friday Connections: a time when I give links and a bit of commentary to things I’d blog about if I had the time. This week the categories are the geopolitics of international population flows and trend, the Commonwealth Games in India (which I didn’t follow much, to be honest), and “gori blogs” that started up while I was on a blogging break.

Allow me to introduce you to my new favorite artist, Nidhi Chanani. I first stumbled on Nidhi’s work on etsy, which is an online community for buying and selling handmade items. I was immediately in love with her whimsical, joyful drawings. Once I found her personal website and bio I realized why the art brought such a smile to my face – while Nidhi was born in India, she grew up in California, is married interculturally – and infuses her art with the diversity of her life.

This weekend a bunch of us “gori bloggers” were featured in an article in the Mid-Day Mumbai. It’s a fun little piece, with lots of different viewpoints featuring some of my favorite bloggers – the questions the editor at Mid-Day asked were pretty thought-provoking for what I thought was a tabloid! I’ve uploaded scanned versions of the article beneath the fold, along with the complete answers I sent in.

If you’ve never checked out the oktrends blog, you’re in for a treat. The company behind the blog, OKCupid, is an online dating site with a fun vibe and an extremely extensive, mostly young, cross-cultural group of users. Like any other dating site, OKCupid is sitting on a virtual treasure trove of social data – but OKCupid isn’t afraid to use it. The blog’s most recent post focuses on some of the biggest cross-cultural questions out there, in fact, and uses some decent statistics to answer ‘em.

If you haven’t been to the forums lately, Pale Desi & others in the NYC area have been organizing a summer meetup! Here are the details (all credit goes to them, not me): NYC Gori Girl Meet-up Coffee and Yummy Indian Chinese food! I tried to make it an earlier dinner because it seems like [...]

Esther Duflo, a development economist at MIT, recently won the John Bates Clark Medal – which is basically means the economics field is saying “You’re brilliant, doing amazing work, but not quite wrinkly enough to win win the Nobel. Please stick around for 20 more years and Sweden will be calling.”

Duflo’s work is all about figuring out what sort of aid programs work and what don’t, so that our aid efforts end up actually helping the poor – basically, she’s taking development work out of the dark age, “we think using leeches to rebalance the humors will help” era of thinking and into an era where scientifically rigorous experiments will let us know what actually does work. In the video above (from the wonderful TED)she explains the sort of work she does, and the results from some of her studies – for instance, in one experiment in Udaipur, India she was able to figure out a way to increase full child immunization six fold for only pennies per child. It’s a very understandable and clear talk, and I highly encourage you to give it 15 minutes of your time.

Ringing endorsement, eh? But let me explain…

Our recent trip to India was:

• Delicious. There wasn’t a single day where we didn’t have great food – of all sorts: chocolate confections at Barista, Maharaja Macs from McDonlds, crazy spicy Indo-Chinese prawns, the best chole bhature both Aditya and I have ever had, endless kabobs cooked to order, and simple-but-amazing home food. I won’t mention how much weight I gained, but let’s just say that there’s a reason I’m now working out six times a week.
• Heart-warming. We saw a lot of family, some of whom I’d never met, as well as a fair number of friends and close teachers that Aditya hadn’t seen since high school. More than once there was a dispute over who we would stay with, or who would get to take us around the city, which was both endearing and a bit awkward (for me).
• Tiring . We visited Delhi, most of the cities of Rajasthan, Agra, Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta, Shantiniketan, and Delhi again in just a little over three weeks. Whew!
• Enchanting. Hands down, I saw and met more amazing places and people on this trip than any other I’ve been on. We took thousands of pictures, and could have easily taken thousands more.
• Full of only-in-India moments. From turning a corner to see a cow giving birth on a narrow street in Jaisalmer (post with graphic pictures to follow in the future) to amazingly incessant begging in Ajmer to traveling on a bus-rickshaw in Calcutta, our trip was filled with times where we’d simply have to turn to each other and laugh.

One thing India wasn’t, however, was hard. Let’s put that in bold:

India, this time around, wasn’t hard.

And that fact really surprised me – so much that it’s taken over a month to write my first post on the trip as I try to figure out why traveling though India wasn’t the challenge that it was the first time.

This is the fourth post from my ten question series on questions and discussions that are particularly important for intercultural or interracial couples to have. All of the posts from this series can be found on the series index, The Ten Questions Every Intercultural Couple Should Discuss.

As all of our friends and family (and, heck, most of you) already know, Aditya and I have this wee little tendency to argue… about everything under the sun. While most of these arguments are playful in nature – the person who’s wrong either owes the other one hundred million dollars or an extra turn at washing the dishes – occasionally one of our arguments can turn quite nasty. We’ve gotten better over the years at discussing things like civilized people (by both of our cultures’ definitions of civilized), but clear, careful communication remains our greatest problem as an intercultural couple.

Talking and debating things – especially about the big issues – can be a challenge for all couples, but intercultural couples can find it especially difficult. When you grow up with dissimilar cultural expectations and social norms, it’s to be expected that your assumptions about what good communication is will be different.

• Is it acceptable to rant and rave and get all your frustrated emotions out during a disagreement, or is it better to stick to the logical facts & reasoning – even if that makes you seem as emotionless as a Vulcan?
• Should you say please & thank you to your close friends and family?
• Can you talk about death or other bad things around the dinner table, or will that lead to bad luck?
• And in all these conversations, what language should you be speaking, anyways?

I’ve written previously on the steps to becoming a good general intercultural communicator, because, well, it’s a hard & long process. It’s one that Aditya and I are still going through, as we figure out how to get past our cultural assumptions about communicating with others and onto the subject of today’s post: identifying what’s stopping you from communicating well with each other – what steps of the communication process are you stumbling over?

Hi Folks, Just letting you know that the Gori Girl forums are now back online. All previous posts on the forums have been restored, and we are now open for posting! ~A

For anyone interested in joining the Spring Gori Girl Meetup in DC (we’re doing this quarterly now), the details are below. All are welcome, and feel free to bring friends if you like.

Who: Anyone who’s interested in coming.

What: A chance to chat in person and get some good food & drinks.

Where: Northside Social Coffee & Wine, 3211 Wilson Blvd., Arlington VA (Orange line, Clarendon stop)

When: I’ll be there at 6:30 pm, at the latest, as will Aditya, and we’ll stay there until at least 7:30 pm. Then, depending on the interest of the group, we will either continue to stay there for dinner (Northside has a small menu) or will go to one of the local restaurants to eat. If you want to come, but are unsure whether you’ll be able to arrive by 7:30, please send me an email at gorigirl.admin@gmail.com, and we’ll figure out something.

Why: Dude. ‘Cause.

Well, we’re back from India! And had the fun of coming back to find the blog hacked and needing a big clean-up. But that’s more or less over (forums will be up this weekend or earlier, with no data lost) – so let’s move on to nicer thoughts… like a spring meetup here in Washington DC!

Americanepali and Andrea have already indicated that they’ll both be available to meet on April 16th, so I’m going to tentatively schedule the meetup for that evening. Anyone else interested in joining in?