Gori Girl » style

Wearing Sindoor as a White Woman

Gori Girl — Wed, 13 May 2009 19:23:38 +0000

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.”

It’s not that I don’t like sindoor in and of itself. The fine, red powder – which is traditionally worn daily by married Hindu women at the front of the center part in their hair – is fine in my books. It’s not a custom I grew up with, but I don’t think it looks bad – just different. And, yeah, sure, I have a tendency to smear it all over my forehead within an hour of application. Whatever – I do that with my eyeliner & mascara most days too, making raccoon eyes a signature Gori look.

No, my problem with wearing sindoor is that most days I’m headed into work. Where there are a fair number of Indian people. And none of them wear traditional Indian clothing, except for the occasional short kurta – certainly there isn’t any sindoor-wearing going on amoung the married ladies! One older Bengali coworker even expressed amazement that I followed the “old-fashioned” tradition of wearing a loha – a gold-plated iron bangle that serves as a wedding ring among Bengali women – on my left wrist daily.

On the other hand, though, when we have people from the Delhi office visiting headquarters, they love that I wear bangles, that I have kurtas in my regular office clothes rotation, and that I occasionally wear sindoor. (Sidenote: when one of said Delhi office coworkers messaged me with a software question that started with a “yaar, how does one…”, I was pretty thrilled at the implied familiarity. Of course, I couldn’t answer his question, since our computer software is acutally composed of ancient cryptic riddles in text files, not understandable data.)

On the third hand (yes, yes, I know), the last time I wore sindoor to the office, my boss wanted to know if I needed a band-aid for the cut on my head. Yeah. Yeah, I know. Does anyone else have problems with this?

I think I’ll be sticking to wearing sindoor strictly outside of the office from here on out. Or put in for a transfer to Delhi.

Why is the Goat Wearing a Sweater? Six Unspectacular Quirks Meme

Gori Girl — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 19:43:53 +0000

I was recently tagged by Blue of the blog bluelightful, bluelicious, bluelovely to complete a meme on “six unspectacular quirks.” I was a bit hesitant to do the meme, at first, ’cause I figured I’d already done the whole “personal life” update post, and, really, there’s only so many times a week I can talk just about myself before I start making Aditya’s life miserable with a swelled head. “Where’s my tea & biscuits? I need caffeine to post. This is important, Aditya. I’ve been tagged!”

Then I thought about it a bit more, and realized that if I couldn’t come up with six intercultural-type quirks about myself, then all those people who’ve talked about having me committed to an insane asylum for being crazy (I prefer “quirky,” thank you) would be proven wrong. And I’d hate to make so many friends, relatives, and coworkers look bad, so I guess it’s time to roll up my sleeves and show just how quirky in a interculturally-relevant-but-not-culturally-insensitive way I can be. Of course, the qualifier of “unspectacular” means you all will be be missing the good stuff… Anyways, the rules of the meme are as follows:

Link the person who tagged you.
Mention the rules in your blog.
Tell us about 6 unspectacular quirks of yours.
Tag 6 following bloggers by linking them.
Leave a comment on each of the tagged blogger’s blogs letting them know they’ve been tagged.

Now, without further ado, let’s get on with goats in sweaters, and five other quirky things.

For me, India = a goat wearing a sweater
This isn’t meant as a big metaphor, where the goat stands for stubborn, hardy folk with sweet sides, and the sweater is the many religions and traditions of the people, all woven together to protect them in their lives, or anything inane like that. No, for me India will always be mentally associated with a goat wearing a sweater because that’s the first scene I saw there that really struck me as, well, different. Or at least the first thing that I saw while not nearly dead from jet lag. At the time I was zooming down a road in Calcutta, the day of our wedding, serenely watching the morning activities on the street, trying to ignore the fact that I’d soon be dead from a fiery explosion when our driver misjudged his margins by a few centimeters. Then, well, a goat caught my eye. But it wasn’t just any goat. It was a goat in a sweater.* My world flipped.
If I find an excellent ethnic restaurant, I’ll return again. And again and again and again…
I guess I’m just a little OCD when it comes to my food. Or, at least, my ethnic food. If I find a good ethnic place (bonus points if they’re take-out), I’m perfectly happy eating there every night of the week, and order the exact same favorite dish. I would, too, if Aditya didn’t stop me. When we were living 1000 miles apart during my final year of college I took advantage of his absence to order over 100 pounds of TastyBite. I feasted on precooked Indian food every day for over a semester. Now that we’re married, though, he doesn’t let me get away with such stunts – meals at my favorite places (Kabob Palace!!! and the taco!!! place) are carefully rationed.
I get a bit of evil pleasure when people try to connect my last name to my skin tone. Actually, a lot of evil pleasure.
When we got married, I took on Aditya’s last name (my nice, short, Germanic last name got pushed into the middle spot). And, while Aditya’s family name is not one that shouts “Indian!” to all that see it, it’s certainly one that shouts “brown!” (it also apparently shouts “mangle me as best you can!” to everyone). I always get a kick out of watching people when they find out my last name, and try to understand how this seemingly white girl could have a brown last name. The best is with other South Asians – they know my name is Indian, but it’s not a regional- or language-specific name, so they can’t just casually bring up a city or area during conversation. And there are Anglo-Indians out there with as fair as skin as I. One of my Indian doctors this past week during the hospital visit was so curious that he came back to my room just to hesitantly inquire “… about your last name? It’s…?” He was a cool dude, so I just told him the truth, rather than playing dumb to continue my fun.
I enjoy watching cricket.
“What?” you might be saying, “Watching cricket is not a quirk! Over a billion people enjoy watching cricket.” This is true. With its diehard support in India, and lessor support in all of the other former pieces of the British empire, cricket is not a sport which lacks fans. But, Mr. (or Ms.) Smartypants, tell me how many American women who didn’t grow up watching cricket -or even knew anything about the game until they were adults – enjoy watching cricket. Pretty rare, eh? At first I just tolerated the hooting and hollering at three in the morning as India got a 6 (it’s like a super home run). But then I started watching the games… And now I’d say that cricket is now one of my favorite sports, in a three-way tie with football & football.
My favorite outfit to lounge around the house in is the cheap inexpensive salwar kameez I got at Big Bazaar
Big Bazaar is like the Indian version of Walmart – cheap prices, huge selection of about whatever you need. Although they’re a bit classier than Walmart, so maybe Big Bazaar is the Indian version of Target. Anyways, the salwar kameez is a beautiful deep blue-green color with gold embellishments, and totally looks like it cost more than the $2.50 I paid for it. It’s also magically both loose and comfy AND nicely form-fitting so I don’t look like I’m wearing a big green sack. It’s like wearing classy pajamas!
I love drinking in rural German bars, but dislike most American ones
As some of you might remember, I spent the better part of a year in between high school and college working in Germany. Before I went, I had done some drinking, but mostly around my parents, and never that much. Well… In Germany, you can start drinking pretty much as soon as you hit puberty, and no one bats an eye. Of course, you can’t drive until you’re 18, and by that time most teenagers have gotten past the “let’s drink until we make bad decisions” stage**. On the whole, I find it a much more civilized system. Anyways, once I arrived in Germany, the local teenagers (& adults) took me under their wing and taught me a bit about alcohol. (And I’ve been ruined for American beers since.) My favorite part about the whole experience was going to the local bar, where we’d spend the evening playing cards, slowly drinking good beer, and just chatting until no one was sober enough to remember who had won the last hand. It was a very warm, gemütlich atmosphere, and one I’ve been unable to reproduce here in the US.

So there you have it. Six somewhat intercultural unspectacular quirks of mine. Oh, and I tag cagey, Mallika, Mirchi, NeoKalypso, Quirkybook, Quizman, as the last six people who commented here with a public blog (that I know of). Have fun, guys!
* I actually think it’s really sweet that the owner of this goat had put it in this sweater. While I’m not a fan of animals in clothes in general, the balmy 70 degree winter weather was cold to Calcuttans, and I’m sure the owner was just trying to keep his goat warm. Still it was one of those things I had just never imagined before, then boom, there it was in front of me.

**I really do think that the Germans have a much better system with regards to alcohol than American do. Children grow up with the idea of drinking socially (they even get their own little malt “beers”), typically start drinking when their parents are around to supervise, and never feel like they need to sneak around or hide their beer or anything. It’s not a way to rebel, so you don’t see the dangerous binge drinking nearly as often as you see in the US. While it takes awhile for teenagers to learn their limits, they’re typically doing this in a safe environment, where there are older people around who can recognize when to cut someone off. And by the time you’re 18, you’ve already had the experience falling off your bike onto sharp cobblestones once or twice to drive home the message of no drinking & driving. So there are very, very few drunk drivers in Germany (also helps that if you’re caught driving drunk, your license is stripped, never to be returned).

My Dainty Swastikas

Gori Girl — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 14:48:30 +0000

Someone gave me a pair of swastikas as a wedding gift.

They were quite beautiful: delicate, pure gold swastika earrings, with subtle etchings along the front and edges. I wish I had taken a picture of them – and of my husband’s face when he opened the gift. I still don’t know who the giver was, but I suspect it was an older Auntie with superb taste and very few NRI relatives.

I’m almost certain it was Auntie since almost all of the single men at our wedding gave the simpler gift of money. Superb taste is certain, given the quality of the gift – similar to the other earrings I received, pictured above.

NRI stands for non-resident Indians – citizens who live in countries other than India. And an older person, with few family members who’ve lived in the West, would almost certainly give no thought to the swastika having any meaning other than the traditional.

You see, in Hinduism, the swastika is an ancient symbol for good luck. And while it’s known that Hitler co-opted the symbol for his own use, the first and primary connotation in India is the swastika’s Hindu meaning. Until they’ve lived in America, or another Western country, most Indians don’t realize that the swastika screams “Nazi, Nazi, Nazi” to those of us raised in the West.

Of course, Aditya, being born and raised in India (and a religious studies major to boot), knew of the true (aka Hindu) meaning of the swastika. The expression on his face was priceless not because he was taken back by the gift, but because my mother and uncle were in the room while we were opening the wedding presents, and it was now up to him to explain to these Americans why we had been given those earrings.

Luckily for him, they’d been traveling in India for a couple of weeks by that point and had already seen plenty of swastikas on the road:

I think it’s the little cultural things, like using swastikas as decorative items, that make you more aware of being in an intercultural relationship than any of the major things, such as food, clothing, or family practices. It’s that little unexpected jar to the system, a reminder that, hey, this person grew up in a fundamentally different culture from me. These little things, however, are the easiest to get used to, though they may look odd to an outsider (“Yes, that’s a swastika in the painting on the living room wall. No, we’re not planning a Blitzkrieg against France anytime in the near future.”).

The swastika earrings situation was easily resolved, like most little cultural things. Maa, having traveled to the US to visit both her sons*** already knew that, uh, difficulties might arise if I were to wear the earrings back home in D.C. She happily accepted the earrings, after checking to make sure I was fine with her regifting them to another young bride.

***Aditya’s older brother, whom we both call “Dada” (which means older brother in Bengali), lives only a few miles away from my dad’s house in California.