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The Times of India has a story about what an Indian university student thought were the most surprising aspects of his experience studying in the US.
Aniruddh Chaturvedi came from Mumbai to Carnegie Melon University in Pittsburgh, Penn., where he is majoring in computer science. This past summer he interned at a tech company in Silicon Valley.
It's interesting reading, some of which you might expect, about economic differences, supermarkets, obesity, etc. made his list of surprising things.
But Americans in general seem to come across to Aniruddh somewhat better than we come across to ourselves:
- Nobody talks about grades here.
- Everyone is highly private about their accomplishments and failures.
- Far from being competitive, Students were highly collaborative
- Strong ethics — everyone has a lot of integrity
- Girls are not very promiscuous, contrary to most Hollywood films
- Almost every single American has access to basic food, clothing, water and sanitation.
- Emphasis on physical fitness/being outdoorsy
His observations were not filled with the anti-American observations that Americans have come to expect from visitors, or that many of us see in our daily lives. He is not totally unaware of some less negative aspects, discrimination, waste of food, money, and prices. But by and large these aspects did not seem a major part of his impressions.
One wonders whether his naïveté will get bruised and he will come to his senses as his studies progress, or if the US is actually nowhere near as bad as many of us think it is.
(Score: 3, Funny) by skullz on Friday October 17 2014, @09:40PM
F--- yeah!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 17 2014, @10:15PM
This isn't a troll. Why is it moderated troll? It is right in the linked article.
"Chaturvedi [the man's opinions whom we are talking about] ended his post with a link to a video of "America F--- Yeah" from the movie "Team America."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Adamsjas on Friday October 17 2014, @10:48PM
So What's your point?
Taken by itself, that clip is ambiguous, and and being a foreign student, he might not have even understood it.
Its certainly out of context with the rest of the article.
The kid sounds pretty spoiled if you ask me. Hires someone to go shopping with him so he doesn't have to
carry any purchases or make any decisions, complains there is no one to hire to do this in the US.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 18 2014, @12:47AM
The kid sounds pretty spoiled if you ask me. Hires someone to go shopping with him so he doesn't have to
carry any purchases or make any decisions, complains there is no one to hire to do this in the US.
It is relative but in India even the middle class have people to do that sort of thing. In fact it is so common that it has become much harder for an Indian ex-pat in the US to find an Indian bride - they don't want to come to the US where they won't have any household staff to do the grunt work. Even in the US it used to be like that about 100 years ago. It is one of the symptoms of a society with extreme differences in economic class. It is the same in the Phillippines where the typical condo will have a "maids room" about the size of a closet where the live-in maid sleeps.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 18 2014, @12:49AM
...Hires someone to go shopping with him so he doesn't have to carry any purchases...
Maybe stores/markets in India don't have shopping carts? Or, to put it another way, perhaps a servant is cheaper than a shopping cart?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 17 2014, @09:54PM
Clearly he doesn't come to these sites for he would find America to be the wretched hive of scum and villainy as us self-appointed intellectuals and enlightened folk around here know it to be (like Mr. First Poster).
(Score: 3, Informative) by skullz on Friday October 17 2014, @10:01PM
WeeeEEEEEllllllll.... if you had actually READ the original content you would have seen that that a quote that Mr. Chaturvedi ended his article with:
Chaturvedi ended his post with a link to a video of "America F--- Yeah" from the movie "Team America."
In closing: Soylent 'Merica! Land of lack of reading the articles.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 17 2014, @10:31PM
Doesn't change my point, however. And ow, the mod burn. Here I was praising our collective self-importance and intellectualism over the lowly "sheeple", as those of us in the know like to say.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Adamsjas on Friday October 17 2014, @10:52PM
Not at all clear if the kid even understood that clip.
He might have thought it was a full on endorcement rather than parody.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 18 2014, @01:03AM
I'm thinking he really did take the clip at face value. I think that's a sign of his cultural naivete, even after being here for ~7 years. Which should modify how we see all of his other observations, the guy's understanding of the american society is still pretty superficial. But you can't blame him for that, I doubt that even 1 out of 10 soybeans knows what both Diwali and Eid are even though there isn't a single Indian who doesn't.
(Score: 2) by gman003 on Saturday October 18 2014, @03:47AM
Americans have an appreciation for "irony" (using the modern, nigh-meaningless definition). Many use that song as a patriotic anthem - in a self-deprecating-but-still-pro-american "yeah, America's pretty fucked up, but we're still #1 and can blow up anybody on the planet, nobody really wants us to be the world police but screw 'em, we're doing it anyway because those bad guys aren't gonna kill themselves" sort of way.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Friday October 17 2014, @10:05PM
... or it tells us a lot about how it is in being a student in India; with or without contemplating degrees of promiscuity. It almost comes of as if India is some backstabbin-super-competitive-hellhole; which I guess is what you get when you have a billion size population.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 17 2014, @10:26PM
From graduate advisers here in the US, I have been told some very horrible things about Chinese national students, some of which is mirrored in this article about Indians. Given what I have been told (more vented at then anything), it is not surprising that this student found the integrity and unwillingness to show off one's grades in the US as interesting. One adviser decided to retire after being fed up with communities of students from eastern nations coming together and blatantly cheating en masse. When caught they would all deny it, even when shown how they wrote in the exact same essay answers during midterms. Many universities make massive amounts of money and prestige off of their foreign student grad programs and outright refuse to punish their golden geese. It is a sorry state in some departments.
I won't name which university it was, but I can say that it is in Michigan and starts with an 'M'.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday October 17 2014, @11:13PM
The topic of dating came up while a (Caucasian) female friend and I were having dinner and she told me that Indian men are the only kind of men she wouldn't date (she's dated a couple Black men in the past). I asked her if it was because they were stinky and she replied that she could even deal with having a stinky man, but Indian men were so unduly arrogant, rude, and pushy that they were intolerable -- and this is from a woman who was married to a Moroccan for a few years.
Claiming that "American girls are not that promiscuous" is a typically face-saving way of Indian men admitting that they are utterly intolerable to Western women.
Although my claiming that "Brazilian women are outwardly sexual but not actually that promiscuous with the follow-through" may sound the same.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 18 2014, @12:54AM
Claiming that "American girls are not that promiscuous" is a typically face-saving way of Indian men admitting that they are utterly intolerable to Western women.
It is not that at all. Most people overseas only know the USA through hollywood, thus they have a really warped view of american women's sexuality. It is the go to argument by people from muslim countries defending the head-scarf, hijab, niqab, etc. They think that if women dress in a western style they will become sluts because they see women in western clothes behave like sluts in all the movies. It's stupid and simple-minded, but that's the way all bigotry works.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 17 2014, @10:07PM
A colleague of mine, from India, told me this on this subject. It's a country where you can drive a car, 70mph, nonstop, 3000 miles across a continent. He meant the quality infrastructure and the efficient governance.
This was couple of decades ago, in the early 90s. I bet the impression is quite different now, and not for the better.
(Score: 1) by Tinyboss on Saturday October 18 2014, @02:19PM
The gas tanks are huuuuuge there!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 17 2014, @10:13PM
I don't disagree with anything he said, positive or negative.
Well, maybe the part about weed being treated the same as cigarettes. Smoking weed is still against the law in most of the US. However, on college campuses smoking weed is probably considered more acceptable than smoking tobacco.
The part of hyper-competitive students ripping pages from library books - I heard that long ago about pre-med students in general, but I didn't hear of it happening at the college I went to.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 17 2014, @10:37PM
Keep your eye on the November election returns.
Cannabis is on the ballot in Oregon, Alaska, The District of Columbia, and Florida. [leafly.com]
Prohibition of marijuana is bound for the same fate as alcohol prohibition.
It won't be too long now.
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 18 2014, @12:05AM
O-Hi-O!! O-Hi-O!!
(Score: 2) by velex on Sunday October 19 2014, @04:42PM
I hope so. Unfortunately, I live in a state that will (may) be dragged kicking and screaming into legalization. There's the pervasive attitude that anybody who wants marijuana already has access, so legalization is not necessary, There's an almost precise rejection of the new research about marijuana that shows that it may be healthy, or at least, certainly not Reefer Madness at least.
Is it too much to hope that my supposed 9th amendment rights might be upheld by this disgusting species?
I'm not sure I will even vote next month. There is no reason—nothing on the ballot that will help me. This coming from me, somebody who used to drive friends to the polls just to vote for somebody (I'd tell them, vote green for fucks sake! Just vote!), to express choice. Such hopelessness.
I don't know how much longer I have.
Alcohol prohibition lasted what? A decade?
Marijuana has been illegal almost a century. The people have gotten used to it. The people want it. The people believe insane shit about marijuana, ironically, the kind of illogic I'd expect a stoner to present me with!
They want their opiod pain pills, not matter what harm it causes them. A painkiller that won't rot your liver? Feh, who needs it! They want their SSRI drugs, nevermind that the best model I've studied says they work similarly to cannabis. Hell, I remember when I asked a doctor for an SSRI prescription. You'd have thought I was fucking high as hell 10 minutes after I took the pill! Yet, the SSRI is terribly addictive. One must take increasing dosages for the dose to be effective. Why can't I have a drug that is neuroprotective and might make me feel *well*?
To be clear. I am not directing this rage at you. I am simply frustrated in general.
I don't know wtf this comment has to do with TFA. Sorry.
(Score: 5, Funny) by mmcmonster on Friday October 17 2014, @10:38PM
A friend of mine was visiting from India. He said he couldn't take beggars seriously in the U.S. because they had all their limbs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 17 2014, @10:45PM
Strong ethics -- everyone has a lot of integrity
Sounds like he never interacted with any elites.
Power brokers with integrity?
Wouldn't that be nice?
Everyone is highly private about their accomplishments
Now I am sure he didn't ever encounter anybody who isn't a 99 Percenter.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by morgauxo on Friday October 17 2014, @11:23PM
>Girls are not very promiscuous, contrary to most Hollywood films
>His observations were not filled with the anti-American observations
Apparently he had one!
(Score: 1) by kaszz on Saturday October 18 2014, @12:16AM
In India:
* Everybody talks about grades
* Everyone is highly outspoken about their accomplishments and failures
* Students are competitive, and very hard to work with
* Poor ethics — few has any integrity
* Girls are quite promiscuous, contrary to most Bollywood films (hmm?).
* Most Indians has problems with access to basic food, clothing, water and sanitation.
* Being a couch potato and sitting indoors is fully alright.
If it's true that many Asians cheat and universities let it pass. Then perhaps those grades will loose by inflation by time?
(otoh, it feels in line with the products from China ;-) )
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 18 2014, @12:59AM
> In India:
While some of those are indeed true, you have fundamentally misunderstood his point. It isn't about the USA being the opposite of India in all those ways, it is about the USA being the opposite of the expectations and stereotypes that many people in India have regarding the USA.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday October 18 2014, @03:21AM
You have a point. Makes one wonder what values that media broadcasts about America.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Saturday October 18 2014, @04:45AM
It's easy to find out. Turn on your TV, rent movies, go to the movie theater. Then visit McDonalds and Starbucks.
I'm an American living in Germany. My short list is what we're exporting -- at least to Germany. Which kind of makes sense. They don't read our books (except the ultra popular ones). They don't play sports or ride their bike the same way. (Not yet where I live at least.) We are communicating mostly through TV series and movies and the ads within them. The youngest generation is picking up on a lot of it too since they are most like Americans. The older generation has trouble with English, but English is easier for the younger generation. They have an appetite for American values.
That's actually a bit frightening to me. I hate seeing other cultures overrun by ours... especially when they pick up the negative traits. And I know we're trying to export it to more cultures too. There's a reason why Transformers 4 [youtube.com] and the new Robocop have scenes in China.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 18 2014, @07:12AM
> There's a reason why Transformers 4 and the new Robocop have scenes in China.
The average hollywood movie grosses more in overseas sales than they do in domestic sales. It isn't so much about those china-specific scenes (which nearly everyone in China can recognize as ham-fisted pandering) but in the dumbing down of the story-telling because cultural references and sophisticated dialog do not translate as easily as "boobs and bombs." Don't worry about the china-specific scenes, worry about the last 45-minutes of Transformers 4 being a plotless series of explosions and mayhem.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday October 18 2014, @12:54PM
Hollywood has ended storytelling and started with bombtelling spiced up with talking boobs in the pauses ;)
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday October 18 2014, @02:17PM
You can also watch our news. Our own people who consume a heavy diet of Fox News (and their opponents) are totally F-ed up in the head as part of the process. Now imagine what a foreigner thinks after watching the same propaganda stream without any grounding at all. Likely the foreigners watch it and say "Better nuke it from orbit just to be sure" Or land airliners in our skyscrapers.
Much as at least in theory we can't export baby food tainted with melamine to Germany or where-ever, maybe we need slightly tighter regulation of exported propaganda so other countries don't think we're all batshit insane as opposed to merely our leadership. Before the freedumb of speech chants begin, I'm not talking about on our soil but exports to other countries, the existing bans on private interference in government international relations, etc.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 18 2014, @05:13AM
so... not well.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 18 2014, @12:52AM
(Score: 1) by Buck Feta on Saturday October 18 2014, @01:43AM
There are many wonderful things about India, but coffee is not one of them.
- fractious political commentary goes here -
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Saturday October 18 2014, @04:26AM
We have rules too. However, they are not enforced nor prosecuted: http://www.ushistory.org/betsy/more/title18.htm [ushistory.org] source:http://www.ushistory.org/betsy/faq.htm [ushistory.org] (Site has a lot of good flag info)
You are not supposed to wear the flag as part of clothing (uniforms of military, fire police etc are exempt.) flag code, section 8d, https://www.senate.gov/reference/resources/pdf/RL30243.pdf [senate.gov]
Another source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Flag_Code [wikipedia.org] and: http://www.ushistory.org/betsy/flagcode.htm [ushistory.org]
However, It is fine to wear a derivative of the red/white/blue color scheme as long as it does not directly mimic the flag. An example is bunting [wikipedia.org] commonly seen during the 4th of July season. Again, see section 8d of the code.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 18 2014, @02:35PM
Unconstitutional and completely unenforceable but still kept on the books for some reason.
Sort of like those States that keep their old anti-inter-racial marriage laws on the books. You know, for "posterity" or something.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 18 2014, @05:50PM
> Unconstitutional and completely unenforceable but still kept on the books for some reason.
Nobody wants to take the political hit for "endorsing flag desecration" it is a harmless bit of pandering.
> Sort of like those States that keep their old anti-inter-racial marriage laws on the books. You know, for "posterity" or something.
I think that one is about "letting sleeping dogs lie" most white people prefer to avoid thinking about racism. It lets them pretend that racism is over in this country. You bring up laws like that, even to abolish them, and you risk starting a discussion about modern racism. The people in the strongest denial happen to be the most loud-mouthed about it. No politician with a significant white constituency wants to get the loud-mouths relied up. No upside for their career in that.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Saturday October 18 2014, @02:44PM
Dude is a little confused about our classless society WRT services and products.
We all have a common consumption level not at all common incomes etc. Saying some shouldn't consume as much as others, is seen Exactly the same as racism for commercial mass media advertising sales reasons. It would be like suggesting we go back to segregated schools or water fountains, from a social faux pas attitude.
As an example, I'm sitting on my $1200 couch last night relaxing after a week at the $120K/yr job reading an article linked to from HN at some SJW website in absolute intestine writhing agony about an anecdote were a dude bought a $1350 couch for his trailer to relax in at the end of the day paid by his $25K/yr job and the SJW article was a couple pages of propaganda about the injustice that the loan shark he rented the couch from actually un-american-ly demanded his rental payment, how dare he, It was pretty freaky. But if you model it as we're all supposed to have a common and equal consumption level (from each according to their ability and to each according to their need) then it all makes sense. We're "supposed to" spend money at a roughly $75K/yr income level. Of course the median is like $40K whoops. For me its pretty easy to consume at the standard level, for the truck driver dude in the SJW story at $25K its really hard to consume at the standard level.
So we've got a 95th percentile job where I live or 90th percentile job nationwide, sitting in a 50th percentile brand new couch, more or less, but the dude in the story has about 20th percentile household income and he's trying to buy (rent, really) the same 50th percentile couch (and yeah I did check the numbers and 1 in 5 american families DO make less than $25K/yr). I didn't check and see if a bit over $1K is a median couch but from a casual observation at the furniture store when we bought it, it sounds about right plus or minus exotic leather upholstery (eww) or maybe immense size costing more for an obese mcmansion.
This is what's confusing the Indian dude. He sees "married with children" and thinks the lifestyle on the stage is an accurate reflection of a retail store clerks lifestyle. The humor might be similar, but the dudes rented room isn't going to look anything like the amazing house stage on the show.
I work in a building with 800 people (probably more) and there's a call center that I know only pays $8/hr and I make about the same pay per hour as they pull per day, but they "all" have new iphones that cost twice what I paid for my Android phone, and have rims and stereos in their car that must cost about as much as my cheap new commuter car. Oh and none of the poor people would be seen dead in shoes that cost any less than twice my cheap-ish sneakers, and I buy kinda nice shoes because I hike a lot at lunch hour etc, I'm talking about $8/hr people buying $300 sneakers made in China for $1/pair. Poor people priorities for spending money are invariably really weird compared to wealthier people attitudes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 18 2014, @05:53PM
> Poor people priorities for spending money are invariably really weird compared to wealthier people attitudes.
A curious person would try to figure out why that is. A self-involved person would decide that its because they are stupid.