Seeking Culture Shock (or the idea of it)

Helloww!! 
Culture shock...

Where are you and what do you look like? I have heard plenty about you and have always wanted to meet you in person and get to know you. Well, and have my own opinion about you.

 A couple of years back, hubby's office transferred him to the company's corporate office in CA and so we moved. And I thought, here's my chance at finally knowing you. 

To US we moved. What I saw barely shocked me or even surprised me. I had already seen some of what I was seeing, heard most of it and read about all of it. Nothing was really new, leave alone be flabbergasted by anything.

I was deeply disappointed by your absense. To make myself feel better I sought a silver lining: Maybe I'd get to meet your younger (and brattier) brother on returning to India. Soon my wish to shake hands with 'Reverse Culture Shock' only got intense. This was bound to be more interesting than just Mr. culture shock, I was sure.

Anyway, two and a half years or almost that, went by. It was only a few months ago that I was looking forward to making my first trip back home to see for myself how culturally shocked I would be (it's the Reverse Culture Shock that I'm talking about)

One November evening I landed in India and waited for THE SHOCK to knock me down.

To my utter dismay, wait as I did, Reverse Culture Shock too failed to turn up to receive me. Nor did I brush shoulders with him in the days that ensued. Or was it that he was present and I only failed to recognise him?

Everything seemed just the same, just the way it had always been in `motherland.' Everything seemed familiar -- just the way it was when we left there -- and the two odd years away just felt like a few days (honest).

Coming back to the second shock sibling: I have heard that you have had rendezvous with even those who have been out for the country for a couple of weeks. Honestly I did want to have a face to face meeting with you; really wanted to know how you would make 'me' feel. Alas!

I was surprised that I wanted to go on an autorikshaw ride again, wanted to have some of that tasty roadside chaat and yearned to hear the sounds of an Indian railway station:  the raised voices of porters and chai vendors (Thankfully I got to do that). 


Obviously you weren't there. Or is something wrong with me that I failed to see you. Or were you avoiding me because I was desperately looking for you? Or was I just returning to something that was already a melting pot?

A thesaurus gone colourless

Lastnight I was looking for a title for a piece of writing and thought only an alliteration would work there. I had been up way past my bed time and my brains just refused to work. Ah! the thesaurus is where I could find the right word, I thought. And so there I was.

Sleepily I open Thesaurus.com and type in 'colourful' and click on Search, and to my chagrin Mr. Know-it-all thesaurus says: No results found for colourful.

At first I thought groggy me had keyed in the wrong spelling. Then I see this next sentence that asks: Did you mean colorful?

Oh my! I'm so tired of this. American spellings!!


Everytime I spell Organisation, Favourite or Realise; or even Centre, my spell check marks it in red. That reminds me of my second standard teacher using her red pen in my book after those dictations I dreaded so much. Back then she would cross out `realize' underline or circle the Z. Phew! I guess some of us will just have to live with these brutal red markings; first in our test books and later in our word documents.


However I wish Mr. (know-it-all) Thesaurus would realise that it is on the World Wide Web that he lives and that there are Indians and Brits and lots of other people in other parts of the world also who use the WW web. He really could be a little more British-English-friendly (and say 'also colourful, like some dictionaries do) after all, it is 'English' that we are talking about.