Appearances...

While on the train one day, I noticed a woman reading a magazine. I was amazed at the number of ads that contained women in them - I would have thought one wouldnt put women on it, because that would mean you would attract only the men with the ad, and not the women. But if so many ads have women on it, perhaps it is targeting both men and women.

And the other trait I noticed was that all the women had perfect bodies. Each one looked like a gym instructor, and they all wore skimpy clothes. Sitting in India, when you read articles about how ads are "objectifying women" it always sounds funny. Here though, it all starts to look real. Women do look at the ads, and they do try to look like that. I have seen some how spend a long time in front of the mirror trying and re trying to tie their hair and then pull out strands so as to get the I-dont-care-what-my-hair-looks-like look. Others pull their shirts out and let it hang with just the right amount of carelessness. There really is nothing so very casual about "casual" anymore. Casual is a very carefully pulled together look with the entire outfit coordinated according to style and color. It takes just as much time doing that as it does to get dressed formally. But I digress...

What I really want to talk about is how everyone wants to be the skinny girl in shorts and a tank top. And being in NY, thats all you really see. Really. I mean, at least dont they want to wear something different from the other girl? Why does everyone want only white during the summer? And everyone is in black tights and boots in the winter. Worse, even if you were looking for something else, you wouldnt find them, because shops only carry what they think are "in season". So much for variety and inventiveness.

There are so many unwritten rules about dressing here. Women who wear long skirts are always "old". Young women wear short skirts that show as much leg as possible. Only old women wear high necked blouses. So the high necked blouses always come in dull grey or beige or brown. The bright colors are for young women, and they come with plunging necklines. Whoever said older women dont like colors, btw? And why shouldnt young women dress with some modesty? I hate the way the shops assume things about everyone. Why wont they make anything for the stray cases who dont think like the mainstream? 

Soda drinking Infants

When I first came here, I was naive and innocent about food - in my world, one simple bought ingredients from the person selling it for the lowest price, brought it home, cooked and ate it. So when I first went to the stores here, I would naturally pick the cheapest vegetables, cheapest milk and cheapest meat. It took me a while to understand that America's shops operate differently compared to Indian ones and that I would have to change my shopping behaviour to buy healthy foods.

It took me a long while to understand how everything here is "mass produced", and what the effects of such production were. Most of what I learnt, I learnt through websites that may or may not have been right. So finally, I bought a book named " Fast food nation".

It is interesting, especially if the kind of food that is available here exasperates you. There have been so many times when we were on a roadtrip when I wanted to eat some "real" food and found that fast food was the only option available everywhere. We would end up buying loads of fruits from some local supermarket before starting off on trips later on. Eitherway, fast food nation has lots of details on how the fast food industry came to be what it is today. One of the details given there was about the advertising by big brands. For example, companies get funding from corporations such as McDonald's to advertise on their behalf - say there was a bottle maker that wanted to sell a bottle for X amount of money. Corporations like Mcdonald's give them money to put their logo on it before selling. The bottle making company is obviously making a profit, and McDonald's is doing their advertising which eventually translates into more business for them. Apparently putting these logos on infant's milk bottles makes them more receptive to the logo later on in life. Another fact mentioned in the book was that many infants start drinking soda instead of milk.

I did not believe that last part at all, at least not until I saw it myself. I thought, which parent would give their children soda instead of milk? One of my relatives had come home with their one year old son. The little guy could walk and could say a few words. A perfectly normal, perhaps slightly hyperactive child. After dinner, the mother wanted to drink soda - she said it was good for digestion! Well as soon as the mother drank soda, the child started asking for it, and was only satisfied after he got it. What surprised me even more was the promptness with which the mother gave it to the kid. For me that action is the height of carelessness.. but for her it was just another normal food item that she was sharing with her son.

Thats when I realized that many parents do not understand why soda is bad. They do not realize that they are sowing the seeds for a life long consumption pattern, so they feel it is ok for the child to drink soda when they want it. What this results in are children with an addiction to sugared water who will grow up and argue with you that diet coke is 0 calories and so one it is just like drinking water. (Which was the reason given by one of my plump coworkers for having about 4 sodas a day while being on a diet).

What can I say.. our lifestyles have changed so much, so irrevocably.  In India, rich people are almost always fat. Well, at least the ones who are not movie stars. Poor people, on the other hand, have perfect figures. I remember a bus ride I once took in which some gypsy women got into the bus somewhere near Jayanagar. I stared at them for a while, because their bodies had a grace and strength that one does not see often. My mother was with me, and when we got off the bus, she too remarked that they had perfectly sculpted bodies. We had a conversation around this and concluded that the rich people eat rich food and do no work and therefore get fat. And the poor people eat fat free foods and do a lot of physical labor and therefore stay in shape. When I came here, it was the exact opposite trend that I saw. The rich ones here are always in shape. They eat organic. They go to gyms. They buy from local farmers markets. They avoid plastic. The poor on the other hand eat McDonalds and dunkin donuts and jack in the box. They go to walmart and cannot afford gyms. If you think about it, it actually makes sense in their world to do what they do - because buying raw materials and cooking a meal often costs more time as well as money than just buying a burger from McDonald's. Thus the poor end up being fat and unhealthy here.

Today I look at fast food chains with a little bit of fear. They have exhausted their possibilities for expansion in the developed countries and are opening shops in places like India and China. Right now the prices are high enough that the local competition there can survive. The corporations will however eventually find a way to subsidize the cost of those items enough to close down competition, like they have done everywhere else. That could eventually lead to a situation where through out the length and breadth of India, we will only get hamburgers. And our children would be drinking soda instead of milk. I hope we have enough sense left in us as a people to not let that happen to us.

Good Doctors...

People in India lament about the difficulty of finding good doctors there. The usual assumption made is that all the good medical students emigrate to the US, resulting in only the not so good ones being left behind there. Having lived there for 25 years, I have been to at least a dozen doctors. Barring a few trusted ones that we know are good, almost every new trial was a disaster. 

The one that is clearly at the top of my memory was when my brother fainted after eating something extremely hot. We were worried that he might have had head injury during the fall, so our family doctor asked us to visit another physician - this guy was supposedly a specialist. This specialist made my brother take an EEG, took one look at it, and asked me and my mother to come to another room, for a "confidential" talk. He then proceeded to tell us that my brother had epilepsy, that he should be put under strong medication for two and a half years, that it would affect his studies, and perhaps the rest of his life. We were both shocked, because there had been no signs of anything like epilepsy before that. The doctor was ready to prescribe the medicines and start off with the treatment, and we took the prescription and went back home, sullen.. My brother at that point was a really good student, and it was heartbreaking to think he wouldnt be what he was anymore because of these medications. 

After getting back home, we had a discussion with my father, who was thankfully less emotionally disturbed. He calmly suggested that we meet another specialist. This time around, we decided it had to be someone who was recommended by people. We went to the new doctor, he examined my brother, and said everything was completely normal. We were confused, and on giving a print out of the older eeg which contained the "abnormality" he immediately laughed and said, oh, the boy must have gone to sleep while the eeg was taken! 

To think that this doctor from a fairly reputed hospital suggested we put my brother on chemicals that cause changes to the brain outrages me even now. I wonder how they can care so little about making such a diagnosis. Did this doctor consider the possibility that it might be wrong at least once? Why didnt he wait for another such occurrence? Why didnt he ask about past history? Why didnt he try to take the eeg once more? Any one of these questions might have pointed the doc in the right direction.... Worst of all, why had he never observed the eeg of another patient who went to sleep during the process when0?

My brother has had no other fainting episodes. And yes, he was school topper in 10th cbse exams, in a fiercely competitive school.  

This is not the only bad doctor I have been to. There have been many... so I believed the assumption that all good doctors were here... until I actually went to some doctors here. 

Last week I noticed that I was hearing considerably lesser from my left ear. There was also some pain when I burped. I first tried to get ear wax out with a q-tip, then tried pouring some ear-ache drops inside and so on. Nothing helped. Finally, after three days of trying to wish this thing away, I went to a doctor. He looked and immediately said, oh, you just have ear wax, we shall clean that out right now... 

He first tried pouring hydrogen peroxide solution into my ear. This is H2O2, so it dissociates into water and O2 and produces this fizzing sound in your ear, pretty much like cola. I didnt mind, so I lied down and waited for it to do its thing. The only thing that confused me was that I had seen paraffin used to do this, instead of H2O2. After giving the H2O2 about 20 minutes to work, the doc came back and said he would rinse my ear. The rinsing was done with a syringe, and wasnt at all comfortable. He then asked if I felt like everything was gone. Nothing had cleared, and I said so. He looked in my ear again, said, oh, theres more. And again poured H2O2 and left for another 20 minutes. And again tried rinsing the ear with water. This time, he also tried to use a qtip to fish the wax out. He apparently tried too hard, because it hurt me quite a bit and I cried out in pain. He told me there was more of the stuff left inside. (In fact, almost nothing had come out). He then gave me the H2O2 solution, and asked me to go and try it myself, at home. He also told me that I could try to fill my ears with water while taking a shower.

I went home and dutifully tried it, with no results. Finally, after about 2-3 days of trying this, I called my father. He told me that H2O2 will dissociate into plain water, and that it will likely not dissolve ear wax, and that he didnt understand why it was poured into my ear to clear out wax. He suggested that I use paraffin. 

All this while, I continued to be unable to hear out of my left ear... I next searched on the internet and found that H2O2 was used for cleaning out ear wax. I even performed an experiment to ensure that it dissolved wax - I fished some wax out of the ear with a Qtip and put it in H2O2 and watched the wax disappear. So I decided that pouring the H2O2 should remedy my problem, and continued to pour more and more of it in the ear - with no results. 

Finally, about a week after I had lost hearing, I went to another doctor. This time, it was a specialist, and looking at his office, I was sure I would get treated with one of those fancy looking equipments. Thats exactly what happened - but it solved my problem, and it took under 5 minutes to finish the whole thing and walk out. What he had was a vaccum pump. He put the thing in my outer ear and used suction, and all the wax came out, with minimal discomfort for me. And later, because I was a little uncomfortable with this vaccum cleaning thing, he cleared out the ear with some water - this time it really did bring wax out - and that was it! All the wax was gone, I could hear clearly, and the pain was gone too!

Good docs are hard to find. Here as well as at home.

How to react when you get poor customer service

Very often, we get treated poorly by certain businesses - they dont explain what they are doing with our money, they dont charge fairly, their quality is poor - whatever. Well, here are some instances where I got bad service and decided to never go back. I would say every customer should do the same thing, just so that people who dont put the customers first will go out of business, and do that quickly.

During the peak of the 2008 recession, there were strong rumors that ICICI would close down, and I, worried that the little bit of money that I had accumulated in just 5 months of working would disappear if I left it with the bank, went personally to the bank to withdraw the amount when the ATM did not work. When I put in my request, I was treated with a curt "no". The lady at the counter would not even make eye contact with me after this "no". I was taken aback because they had fought with two other banks to get me to open my account with them- until then, I was always welcomed, given lots of investment options, talked to politely, and generally treated well. I understand it was a difficult time for them, but they could have treated me slightly better, because it was my money they were talking about, and not theirs. I finally said "Thank you", and walked away, irritated. I resolved that day that when this crisis was over I would transfer my money and close down that account - it took me four months to get that done, but it did happen, and I have never since walked into an ICICI bank.

When I first moved to the US, we were in a studio apartment in a luxury rental named Liberty Towers. I had until then lived in a fairly large house, so the concept of a studio was something of a shock to me, but worse than that was the attitude of the management of the building. My husband had taken the studio at the rate of a 1 bedroom apartment, because the management had told him that there were no 1 bedrooms available at the time he rented this apartment. He had told them he would be getting married, and that a studio would not be enough. The management made him sign a lease for a studio, and gave a "verbal" agreement that they would give him a 1 bedroom as soon as one became available. Poor hubby completely did not understand the deviousness of the whole thing, and he kept asking them for the 1 bedroom. Each time, they would show him something, and quote a rent that was way more than the $2375 we were paying, and tell him this was all that was available. He waited, and we got married, and I moved into the studio, and we were still not able to get the 1 bedroom. Meanwhile, I started to notice that a lot of the apartments were empty, and so there could not have been an "unavailability" of 1 bedroom apts. So we finally asked one of our friends to come and ask for the rates for 1 bedrooms, and lo and behold, they were available cheaper than our studio! It was just that they were just not available when we asked for it, because the guy wanted us to shell out even more than what we were already paying. There really was nothing we could do - breaking our lease meant we would have to pay a penalty of 2 months of rent, so we decided to live in the apt. until the lease ran out. Meanwhile, we also got acquainted with another couple who had leased just before us, and who got a 1 bedroom cheaper than our studio, on a higher floor! It was so clear we were being ripped, and it was sad to know there was nothing to be done about it. In any case, we finally came to the end of our lease term, and moved out of there, and have never gone back since.

And then there are the services that talk very well, but try to cheat you covertly :

 A few days ago, we booked a car for two days - the cost was supposed to be around $250 for the two days. The booking was made online, and we received an email confirmation about the reservation soon after. While returning the car though, we noticed that the bill was over $300. Confused, my husband asked why this happened, and the person helping him explained that the charge that was in the email was pre tax, and this was the amount we had to pay after tax. My husband pulled out the email confirmation, which stated that $250 was after tax, and asked him to remove the additional tax. The guy then backed down and cancelled the second tax and allowed us to finish the transaction.

Just yesterday, we noticed that we were charged over $100 for being late by 2-3 days on a credit card payment, despite this being the first such late payment. What was interesting was that about half of it appeared on one bill as finance fees, and the other half on another bill as some other fees. It took a while to figure out that in total we had to pay this amount for the 4 days that we got late. After talking to customer service however, we managed to get the charge waived - apparently as a gesture of good will. 

In both these cases, I cannot say I got poor customer service - my problem was solved when I called them up, but the point is that there should have been no problem in the first place. So these guys will get my "not preferred, but will make do with it if I have no choice" rating. 

Can I remember someone who gave me exceptional service?

 A salesman for Maui Divers Jewelery who sold me a single South Sea Pearl floater worth $200 - that purchase made me feel really special, and I felt I had paid just what the piece was worth - the man did not try to make me buy something more expensive, did not try to sell me another piece, did not try to say that the pearls I had already were bad. He just was a nice guy trying to help me pick something I loved. I really felt grateful to him for that, and it is not often that one remembers people one buys jewelry from so vividly.

 Another salesman who sold me a pair of Maui Jim sunglasses - he also did not compel me to buy something I did not want, he showed me all the options he had, told me what was good with each one, helped me eliminate stuff I didnt like, and finally I ended up with a pair that I really use now. 

A "statistically insignificant" death

Some days ago, a student from IITM committed suicide.

Some premise: IITians may be brighter than most others, but they have the same emotional intelligence as the general population. So they react in ways that they have seen the general population react. Each time however, the media makes a huge furor about the incident, and usually blames the profs and the system there for having driven the student to suicide. This was even shown in a movie that became a huge hit in India sometime ago.

This time, the student who committed suicide did it because his BTP got extended (without warning, apparently). The exact same reason that was shown in that movie... And the media made as usual questioned the system. The Dean from IIT apparently gave the following response : "3 out of 5000 students who are here commit suicide. That is not even statistically significant, so why are you blaming the system?!"

Dear Dean,

How would you like it if it was your child who was in question here? Would it be dismissed as statistically insignificant?
What does your statement reveal about how much you empathize with your students?
Did you think of how demoralizing such a statement is for other students and whether they would even consider coming to you if they had a genuine problem if they knew this was your attitude?

Did you pause for a moment to consider the possibility that you could strengthen access to couselling among students to make sure the suicide ratio is 0 / 5000? I have studied in another engineering college, and there were no suicides that I knew of, in my 4 years there. I was in IIT for just a little over 2 years, and I knew of more than 1 each semester. Surely, that means the numbers are more than it is elsewhere? Surely, that also means you need to put in more effort than everyone else to make sure these kids come out alive?

In my opinion, the dean must be fired. 

Do you know me?

I was thinking about Douglas Merrill today... I mean, I really feel like I know him, somehow. I have been reading his blogs for several years now. I feel like I understand what he means, I know somethings about what he has done etc. If I met him somewhere, I bet I could carry off a conversation off of his last blog entry.

However, the truth is, I dont know him - at all. I have never met the guy. Yet I feel this "closeness" to him, like countless others who read popular blogs. And we all get confused, at least in our minds, about how much we know the other person.

The truth is that we know almost nothing about the authors whose blogs we read. Reading a blog, in my mind, is just like reading parts of a book written by an author. Saying that you "know" someone after having read someone's blog is equivalent to saying you "know" someone because you read that person's book. We never seem to make a mistake with respect to the book and its author - we seem to have an innate understanding of the relation a creation (the book) has with its author, so we dont confuse the book's contents with the author's personality or identity. At least, not normally. I mean, has anyone ever thought that they would know Salman Rushdie by reading Midnight's Children?

On the other hand, there are so many people who seem to feel like they know each other well just because they read each other's writing. I even know a couple who met on the blogosphere and got married! I wonder why they do not realize that what gets written is only the part that you want the other person to know. It leaves little room for forming opinions of one's own about somebody - because most of the time it is about putting on an exterior that can impress people.

Of course there are rare people who pour their hearts out on a blog. Perhaps they are the ones who find their sweethearts here. For me though, its just a way of recording some random thoughts I have. Just so I can get back to it and take it up again if I need to. I would never bother to write the real me down for strangers to read. And I guess I wont understand why anyone would want that... But it takes all kinds, I guess.