Conversations with my brother
Friday, June 6, 2008 at 10:37PM My brother is here! He came here for just three weeks. Before you know it, his trip is coming to an end and he is going back to India.
The best part of his trip was that I got to talk to him for 40 mins in the morning and forty minutes in the evening while driving to work and back (he became my carpool buddy, as his client was just 0.5 miles from my office!). Have not had a chance to talk to him this long in the last ten years where during our India trips, there would always be a lot of background noise, interruptions and just plain lack of opportunity for us to talk. After I got married and he got married and started families, it was pretty much impossible to talk.
There are only two guys who have that kind of rapport with me. The kind where you can finish the other persons sentence. My brother and Dr. Durga (who is currently absconding).
My brother does not read my blog. He thinks it is an abomination that should be stopped. "How can a person put such personal thoughts into free space?" he asks me. The only answer I give him is "Because, I can!". He nods his head in disbelief.
We have had our share of jokes. So here are some things that lightened my day.
Apparently they are opening a new saravana stores in Adyar which has the potential to clog the entire area. His fear was that it would take him 40 minutes to get from the steet to his house via Saravana Stores. When I asked him what this is all about his response "Do you know you can get anything, anything in Saravana stores? Their jingo should be "komanaththilirundhu Koorai pudavai mudhal anaiththum kidaikkum". ( கொமணத்தில் இருந்து கூரை புடவை முதல் அனைத்தும் கிடைக்கும்!) ie., We sell everything from a loin cloth to a wedding sari . That cracked me up.
When I picked him up outside his office, he kept waiting. A car was also waiting. Finally he crossed the road. I asked him why it took him so long to cross the road and he said "I was waiting Indian style for the car to go. He was waiting American style for the pedestrian to go! I still cannot get over the fact that people in cars wait for pedestrians here! It is just unbelievable." I just smiled.
Then we had a long long continued discussion over my being the only Ph.D. in the family( maternal) or the only one who is not in the IT field! He had an interesting concept that definitely did not strike me, till he put it that way. We did an analysis of the professions of our parents, uncles and aunts, and our professions and our cousins. In effect they are all doing the same jobs. Here is my excel spreadsheet summary..
If you notice one thing on my parents generation, everyone gravitated towards a Government Job! (My mother, her brother and four sisters all work(ed) for the government!)
My grandfather was a finance clerk and my grandma was a homemaker. They had six kids! They grew up in very difficult circumstances. They studied, and tried to get placed in the one job that guaranteed stability and financial security, a government job! When I graduated and wanted to come to the US to do my Ph.D., my uncle gave me a long lecture which started with
"Sundaram.. akkadannu oru bank exama ezhudinoma, sivanennu oru bank udhyogaththa paathundomannu irukkama ennaththukku da inda America Gimerica ellam? Avan chandra mandalaththukku aal anupparanam. Inge jananga sOthtukke vazhi illama thavikkaradhu! PaNatha vachchundu enna pannaradhunnu theriyaadha alayaraanunga, ange poi nee enna da panna pore! etc. etc." and the entire family pretty much pitched in with a "thatasathu" (which is along the lines of an Amen or Insallah or "so be it"!).
For those of you Tamizhs and non-Tamizhs here is the verbage and its english translation..
சுந்தரம், அக்கடானு ஒரு பேங்க் எக்ஸாம் எழுதினோமா, சிவனேன்னு ஒரு பேங்க் உத்யோகத்த பாத்துண்டோமானு இருக்காம என்னத்துக்குடா இந்த அமெரிக்கா கிமேரிக்கா எல்லாம்? அவன் சந்திர மண்டலத்துக்கு ஆள் அனுப்பரானாம்! இங்கே ஜனங்க சோத்துக்கே வழி இல்லாம தவிக்கறது! பணத்த வச்சுண்டு என்ன பண்ணறதுன்னு தெரியாத அலையறாங்க, அங்கே பொய் நீ என்ன டா பண்ண போறே ? ......
Sundaram, instead of simply writing a bank exam and settling down in a bank job, why do you need all this America Gimerica stuff? Americans are sending people to the moon, while people are dying of starvation here! They have a lot of money and don't know what to do with it. What are you going to do in a country like that? .....
It would always drive me nuts when people hold the ability to blend in with the crowd and being average, as some kind of virtue! As it so happened, I did not write a bank exam four years after getting through the IIT entrance and graduating with a B.Tech in Metallurgy, although it would have made the entire family proud. Thank god for small favors!
Lets come back to my brothers observation, which has to do with the N+2 generation. We were all raised in a lower middle class background where at least one or both parents were government servants, but the paychecks were not big, the houses were rented and anything that you did not need absolutely, you just did not get! We were trained to understand the financial circumstances of the family and were taught that if we wanted to at least have the standard of living that our parents had, we better start loving that big fat Bank exam book that our uncle and aunts used to use as pillows!
The funny thing was that there were people around us who were way more well to do than anyone in our family. They would never be used as role models or examples simply because they were in "risky" professions, were "probably" not earning an honest living simply by the amount of money they made, or branded as people who had "no respect for the right combination of money and values"!
Save for me, the rest of the siblings and cousins all got nice degrees in everything from BITS Pilani, REC Trichy, Venkateswara college, Crescent, Meenakshi, St. Josephs, etc. and they all write code for a living!
The bro's point being, given a choice my uncles and aunts would pass on their hard earned government jobs to their kids, were it not for the fact that most or all of their jobs are being replaced by Computers! In effect the N+2 has taken the job of the N+1. The bank tellers son is now writing the Log In screen for Citibank and the Auditors son is writing code for some International Auditing firm! Today's version of a teller job is an IT job! (this is strictly in context of the examples in this post. I am not generalizing all IT jobs as the logical evolution of the Clerical job from the previous generation).
If you think about it, it does make sense. In India's current job market, a job with Infosys, TCS, CTS, Wipro or HCL gives you the same sense of stability and financial security as the government jobs of State Bank, Indian Bank, Canera Bank, Syndicate Bank, Dena Bank of yore! In those days a "government job" meant a better mate in the arranged marriage system. Today the "IT" job has the same effect!
As for a Ph.D in Materials, it still sticks out like a sore thumb! The conversation now veers to "See, we can get jobs anywhere in the world. But can you have a semiconductor fab in India? Maybe in another 20 years. Maybe never! What is the use of doing all this work, if you cannot come back to India?" and I respond with "I am very happy with what I do here and have no plans to come back as of now! We will cross that bridge if we ever come to it."
It almost appears as though, yours truly doesn't speak the same "language" as the rest of the family!
If only I could converse with them in C++, assembly language or Java?!
.
IT, Ph.D., brother, conversations, jobs, metallurgy
Reader Comments (8)
At least your family understands what a semiconductor fab does -- there are semiconductors in their mobile phones!
I tell people that I do research on weather radar and then have to grapple with the metaphysical question: "why does any one need to know what's going to happen in 2 hours?"
dai, nee vera.. my siblings and cousins understand what I do.. I tell them if it were not for guys like me, they would not have MEMS chips and that means no Wii
they keep their mouth shut and humbly bow before me..
what to do! you have to resort to extreme things like "no me, no wii!" to get respect.
after reading your comment, I just got a visual of you doing a little poster "show and tell" under a neem tree for the village elders with tsunamis, hurricanes, etc. in pictures.. cracked me up!
:)
somehow you remind me of SRK in Swades!
It would always drive me nuts when people hold the ability to blend in with the crowd and being average, as some kind of virtue!
My feelings so much resonate with this thought. I literally balked when I heard this from my friend's parents(Do you really want to be an exception in life.. You should do what the rest of the society does) when my parents/family were very supportive.
PS. I stumbled on your blog from terry's.
didn't read the complete post - need to do so after this comment, else i will lose my chain of thought!
"We sell everything from a loin cloth to a wedding sari . That cracked me up."
i don't know what exactly cracked you up, but my fertile imagination conjured up the following pg-13/nc-17/?? sequence:
sell loin cloth and wedding sari: good situation; population under control. no pre-marriage babies.
sell no loin cloth, but sell wedding sari: population explosion.
sell loin cloth and no wedding sari: good situation; no marriage, no babies. population under control.
sell no loin cloth and no wedding sari: lots of pre-marriage babies, not good.
maybe an excel spreadsheet will illustrate this better, eh? ;-)
- s.b.
sundar:
thanks for the translation - that was helpful indeed!
"why do you need all this America Gimerica stuff? Americans are sending people to the moon, while people are dying of starvation here! They have a lot of money and don't know what to do with it. What are you going to do in a country like that? ....."
if your uncle were living in the usa right now, he could very well have re-phrased the above as:
why do you need all this swades/vides stuff? desis are sending rockets to the moon (chandrayaan) when people are starting to starve here (so they can fill their gas tanks). they have a lot of money and don't know what to do with it (this is strictly based on anecdotal and/or hearsay evidence, and intra-office discussions of flat/housing costs in chennai). what are you going to in a country like that? ...
... maybe it is time to r2i, eh? ;-)
- s.b.
krithiga, welcome to this blog.
trust me this is quite a common theme in middle class agraharam families!
s.b., yes. you definitely need a graph or a spreadsheet for that thought.. as for r2i, no!
that is a problem for me right now. I reallly like doing what I do at work here... maybe in 5-10 years manufacturing will catch up in India.. then r2i???
Blending in with the masses was a theme of that time. Entreprenuerial spirit was looked down upon.
The world has shifted beneath our feat. And so we have evolved in that respect.
At this very same time, the ground beneath is still shifting. 'Medical or Engineering?' was a famed question.
And when i chose commerce, the obvious question was, 'which subject did you fail in?'
Then, medicine lost its sheen. And i see that happening to IT in some time. While I hope otherwise, i think we will eventually land there.
Then what ?!?
Perhaps metallurgy
Kavi,
possibly not!
two things in short supply that have increased the bill in the house enough to feel the pinch
gas at 4.50$ / gallon (it was 2.2$ less than 18 months ago)
rice is now 16.99 for a 20 pound bag. it was 7.99 two months ago!
maybe farming (grain or solar) would be my guess.
:)