The American Club has a library of sorts, which is filled mainly with pulp novels by Michael Crichton (not even his more famous ones), Jeffrey Archer, Ann Rule and then an odd assortment of science fiction or fantasy series (like the Amtrak series?). I've been in a reading frenzy for the past few days (I think I finally reached my fill of bad TV for the time being). Yesterday I read The Reader (highly recommended by the way) and today I am making my way through The Inscrutable Americans by Anurag Mathur about a small town Indian man named Gopal who spends a year at a University in America. It's a pretty funny book, and reading it while on the Indian subcontinent is a kind of through the looking glass experience. In many ways I can relate to exactly how he feels regarding the differences between cultures even though we are coming from the exact opposite perspective.
This passage in particular really struck a chord:
"You've forgotten your seat belt again, Gopal."
Gopal began to buckle it on. He had never understood this national mania for seat belts. In India, he thought cars didn't even have seat belts. And if a manufacturer did install them the driver would probably merely assume it was a useful device with which to strangle opposing drivers during one of their numerous fights.
Certainly there was a great merit in seat belts. But typically the Yanks had made such a fetish out of it, that it annoyed every right thinking person.
SARAH. This has nothing to do with anything, certainly not Bangladesh, but I thought of you (and a little of Erin) for some reason related to awkwardness. I just sat through the MOST uncomfortable 3 hour GRE math prep course, in which the instructor grew increasingly bad at math and increasingly more stressed out, and eventually just lost his voice. It went from basic arithmetic mistakes to uncomfortable brow-wiping and vague allusions to personal problems, to the final five minutes filled with stage-whispered "strategies" where he scribbled through some problems and moved on before we could see they were all wrong. I have never been in such an uncomfortable class or presentation. And then: This was just the regular prep course. I also paid for a "Math Refresher" from the same guy, and I highly suspect it will not be in any way refreshing.
ReplyDelete4 HOURS. It was 4 hours.
ReplyDeleteHAHA wow -- that sounds unbearably terrible. What kind of personal problems was he alluding to. You know my fascination with awkward situations.
ReplyDeleteThis totally sounds like an Erin story not a Raven story.
I actually told Erin about the class. If only she'd signed up, we could have shared the moment. I have no idea what the personal problems are, but I imagined everything from drug addition to bad allergies to a breakup with his lover.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if I can call it "unbearably terribly" on a blog that contains so much info about extreme poverty and human rights violations. But in the scope of my daily experiences on campus, it was a very unhappy four hours.
It's all relative. I think that sounds unbearably terrible ;-)
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