Anyway, SEVIS is now convinced I am who I say I am and where I say I am (if I wasn't then why would I say I am? :P) . I am ready to get a social security number. I just signed the lease on an apartment. In short, I am close to being a non-nonentity. Mostly I feel the transition has been smooth and largely hassle free.
George Bernard Shaw once said "I dislike feeling at home when I'm abroad". I'm not entirely sure I agree/disagree with him, but naturally, when you land in a new place, you would expect to be confronted by strange people in a strange land. Neither was really true in my case!
My first days away from home were not spent with strange people but with Poorvi (my cousin) and her friends (Thanks Dinesh, Anu, Tina!). They really really made me feel at home right away. The 'land' hasn't really been very strange either because of a)(over)exposure and b) globalization.
I frankly think I was exposed to all things American waaay too much long before I came here! Too many people gave me too many inputs about life here to let any charm remain in moving to a new country. I knew people drive on the wrong side of the road, I knew switches operated the wrong way, I knew people used credit cards EVERYWHERE, I knew everybody was informal, I knew people greeted each other all the time, I knew people (almost) never broke traffic rules, I knew you got cheques (checks) instead of bills and paid with bills instead of cheques (checks), I knew you kept thanking, apologizing and appreciating all the time, I knew that the system of measurements was what the rest of the world had thrown away, I knew you needed 'quarters' to use a pay phone or do the laundry, I knew you called 911 for the cops, I knew the medical system is quite simply put incomprehensible, hell, I even knew a dime was smaller than a cent (well actually I'm not sure about that!). Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that nothing really seems new or different. Every odd thing I see, somebody has described to me before. Or I've seen it on Friends. Or Seinfeld. Or the Tonight Show. Or CNN. Or.. Ok you get my drift!
That brings me to point b, globalization. As Thomas Friedman has argued beautifully in his book, the world is flat. Geographic location doesn't really matter. The liberalization of economies has meant that the same global (American) giants now operate out of Chennai or Bangalore just the same as from San Francisco or New York. You can thus have the same global (American) lifestyle (McDonalds, FedEx, Google, Nike.....) irrespective of where you live. I see the same Coke, the same Subway, the same Toyota Corolla and the same Dell. Maybe this is one of the reasons I don't really feel much of a difference between living in Chennai and SLC. And of course, India has been catching up with the rest of the world on many counts, thus in some ways reducing the gap that existed. For example, a large shopping mall is not something I would gawk at now. Nor is a 6 lane highway. Or a Mercedes S Class. Its all the same!
