Gori Girl

Aditya’s parents are visiting us again for the second time – they arrived late last week – which has cut into my blogging time as we catch up with them. Of course, it also means plenty of blogging material is being generated with our temporary extended family living situation. The last time they visited I only got out one substantive post on the topic – I hope to do a bit better this time. Of course, that post – which was on the (eek!) order that Aditya’s parents tried to bring to our home, disrupting my chaotic-but-somehow-functional mess of a system – still haunts us. Today Baba and Maa dusted and vacuumed the house while we at work – and then jokingly pointed out after I arrived home that my piles of mess were exactly where I left them, just cleaner.

(Little do they know that if I am stymied in blogging about their dastardly actions of cleaning our house & cooking delicious meals I have no problem in getting irrationally upset about some other minor issue. For example: the fridge has been reorganized without my express permission, and the dishwasher was inefficiently loaded, resulting in one less cup being washed than if I had loaded it. I’m still reeling!)

Since I haven’t had a chance to sit down and think through a post lately, I thought I’d share with you the transcript I’ve typed up in spare minutes from an NPR segment called Intercultural Relationships: Can They Work?. I’m not a professional transcriber, so there may be errors – but I figured something was better than nothing for those of you who can’t (or don’t like to) listen to podcasts. The segment (and my post title) was developed from an article in East West Magazine. The article, which you can find here, is quite complimentary to the NPR segment, and I encourage you to read it as well as the transcript below. I’ve bolded the parts I find particularly interesting, and will post my thoughts on it tomorrow in the comments section.

If you haven’t been following the current protests and events in Iran, then I highly encourage you to do so.

For those of you who haven’t heard about the Iran elections (not surprising given the relatively light coverage in mainstream media), Iran held presidential elections this past Friday on June 12th. The current hardline president, Ahmadinejad, was announced the winner, but the elections results released are extremely fishy, and not in line with what opinion polls were predicting. The main statistical improbability is that Ahmadinejad had roughly the same percentage of votes (around 65%) across different rural and urban areas and across different provinces, including the home provinces of his opponents and ones like Kurdistan, which historically goes for the opposition candidate like California goes for the Democratic one.

So what, right? Just another sadly rigged third-world election?

Well, as the pictures here show: No.

Me? Oh, well, I don’t have a faith. And, no, I’m not interested in getting one either.

That was my polite non-answer when asked about my religious beliefs by two Christians who stopped by Aditya’s and my doorstop to proselytize last weekend. And it was as true, as far as it goes – I’m not one much for simple faith in any context. When discussing my religious beliefs with friends & family, I’m most likely to to describe myself simply as an atheist. But when I’m feeling a little mischievous – or argumentative – I’ll sometimes put in that I’m an atheist – and a Hindu.

Yeah, it’s a bit of a complicated situation; I blame Aditya for it completely. Like many other things in my life, religion is something that has become more complicated since we set off on our intercultural marriage adventure.

Continuing from where we left off last time (see Part One for more details), here is Part Two of Mrs. Mortimer’s 1850s children’s book on India. The sections here – Religion, The Castes, The Ganges, and Beggars – are focused on Hinduism in India. Sadly, I suspect that few Americans know any more details about Hinduism than what is presented here – and I would not be surprised if few fundamentalist Christians (like some family members of mine) give the religion any more of a fair shake than Mrs. Mortimer does here. Of course, the words here are also troubling because a fair amount of it is true – although not the whole truth – once you strip away the venom and slant.

Okay, I’m a huge supporter of researching your significant other’s culture and understanding cultural differences, but let’s just put this one out there: worrying about intercultural quirks can be taken too far. There’s reasonable concern, and then there’s fretting over – or being shocked by – cultural differences that, in the end, don’t really matter. Basically, Internet, I’m saying you shouldn’t get your tighty-whities in a wad over the smaller cultural differences or customs you discover in your intercultural relationships.

(And no, it’s not all small stuff – but there’s more small stuff than the amount of complaining would suggest.)

You may have noticed that, unlike many intercultural blogs, I don’t post any recipes of new Indian dishes I’ve learned to cook. Partially that’s because, well, I don’t cook much Indian food, really. And partially because I figure that all of you are intelligent to google your way to the thousands (or, at least, dozens) of cooking blogs that feature great recipes of traditional Indian dishes. There’s a few blogs I particularly like listed in the sidebar under Odds & Ends, if you haven’t seen this blogging niche before.

However, at least in the food blogs I follow, I’ve seen an untapped segment in the market – there aren’t any recipes of Indianfied traditional American dishes! This sort of fusion food, along with stir frys, is the majority of what I cook – just simple dishes that you ate growing up mixed with an Indian sense of spices. They’re the best of both worlds: quick, easy recipes that I know like the back of my hand adjusted so that Aditya won’t complain about “blandness” when we eat.

So, today I’ll share with you my recipe for Quick Indianfied Chicken Pot Pie. This is the dish that got amazed raves from Aditya’s parents when I served it to them. (I think that prior to my cooking it, they hadn’t realized I knew how to cook at all, so perhaps they were just glad I hadn’t accidentally poisoned them.) It’s a very simple, quick, filling dish, so even if you’re not much of a cook, you should be able to manage just fine. Besides the text below, I’ve loaded a bunch of images on my flickr site to show you how to do it step-by-step too.

The study of economics screws up your brain. Or, at least, that’s what people outside the field who haven’t drunk the econ kool-aid tell me. (Like most potentially insane people, I, of course, wouldn’t know if I were in fact insane. That’s the fun of it!)

Anyway, I’m informed that most people don’t think about romantic relationships in terms of intertwined, interdependent utility functions. But I do. And I think you should consider the idea too. Think of it as practice in learning how a subculture (a geeky, mathematically-inclined subculture) thinks about love and romance.

There is no nation that has so many gods as the Hindoos. What do you think of three hundred and thirty millions! There are not so many people in Hindostan as that. No one person can know the names of all these gods; and who would wish to know them? Some of them are snakes, and some are monkeys!

Monkey gods!!?! Snake gods? And people call me a heathen!

Of course, I’m sure that I would be in for a few more choice names from Mrs. Favell Lee Mortimer, the Victorian children’s author who wrote the choice quote above. Mrs. Mortimer published a trilogy of geography/travel books for young missionaries-in-training, covering all of the world that Victorian England cared about in the 1850s — a truly amazing accomplishment, given that the lady had only traveled to Scotland and France during her life. Of course, accuracy and detail were not exactly Mrs. Mortimer’s aims: she does not claim “completeness, nor comprehensiveness, nor depth of research, nor splendour of description ; but the very reverse… simple, superficial, desultory character, as better adapted to the volatile beings for whom it is designed.”

Ah, how I miss my days as a volatile being!

Anyways, I found the book which covers Asian nations, Far off, in GoogleBooks this weekend, and thought to share some of the chapter on “Hindostan” with everyone. However, if you don’t have a taste for black humor – or can’t handle her rather venomous style of writing -, then feel free to skip this one. I do think it is very informative & thought-provoking, though – both for what she gets wrong about India, and what she manages to get right. Colonialism at its very best, of course:

Aditya loves, loves, loves it when I wear sindoor. For him it is the epitome of beauty. (There’s also probably an element of husbandly pride and maybe something oedipal going on, but, hey, you can’t win them all.) When I reach over to open to the medicine cabinet while brushing my teeth in the mornings, his face lights up in the hope that I’m grabbing out my container of vermilion powder:

“Are you going to wear sindoor today?” You should! – you look so beautiful when you wear it!”

And, almost always, I mumble something that amounts to “no, not today.”

Want to settle the debate on how much interracial marriage there is in the US? I know I’m tired of hearing the occasional uninformed comment on how South Asians just don’t marry people outside their ethnicity, and isn’t it downright odd that my supposedly proud-of-his-Indian-heritage husband would do so?

(Hmm, well, he is an odd, odd dude. But not because he’s married to me. Or, I mean, not ’cause he’s married to a white woman – I’ll admit you might have to be odd to voluntarily marry me. We brought matching crazy to the marriage table as dowry.)

Well, the statistics on interracial marriages in America are now here, courtesy the US Census, so we can put this baby to rest. Actually, the statistics have always been “here” since the 2000 Census information was released, but I’m not such a numbers nerd that I felt like crunching the raw data myself with SAS or STATA. Luckily for me, a pair of sociologists have already done the dirty work, and their results have been made available at Dr. C.N. Le’s Asian Nation website. I’m going to only present the South Asian related statistics here, but Dr. Le has the same sort of information available on all Asian ethnicities, and you can tease out information about other ethnicities as well.