From India to Indiana – A Tale of Two Worlds
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| Deepak Kothavade with wife Sharda and twins Meera and Gautam. Photo courtesy of D.Kothavade |
By Guest Writer Deepak Kothavade
Culture is generally defined as the arts, customs, inventions, language, technology, traditions etc created by a group. In keeping with the theme of this blog on understanding and accepting different cultures, through this post I hope to present my experience as it relates to the language/communication aspect of a culture.
I was born, brought up, and spoilt (!) in Mumbai, India. I came to the U.S. in the Fall of ’98 for business graduate studies at Indiana University. This was my first ever visit to the U.S. (anywhere outside India for that matter), so it was a big change for me. Among the many cultural adjustments I had to go through when I first moved here, I think the most amusing one was trying to understand the American accent.
Though English is not my native language, I have always been very fluent in it. I had to be – all of my education right from kindergarten through the undergraduate program was in English!! But, when I first came here it felt as if English was an alien language. I used to have a hard time understanding what was being said. And the reverse was true too where folks would struggle to understand what I said. Obviously, it was because of our respective accents. In those early days, there were many amusing, and sometimes frustrating, incidents. Since I came here as a student, most of them happened at school.
When classes began at my graduate program, imagine my horror when I could not grasp what the professor or classmates would be saying. It used to take my brain a good 15-20 minutes to tune to the newer accent before I could realize what was going on. With 45 minute sessions, that is about one-third of the class gone wondering what in the world is going on. To make matters even more interesting, our grades were partially tied to class participation. I used to come home from school thinking how in the world am I going to earn that part of my grade when I am practically clueless as to what’s going on in the classroom?!
There were even funnier stories when we had to work on our class assignments. Some of them were to be done in a group setting and a similar pattern repeated – the first few minutes of the group meeting, I would be clueless. I only prayed that in those few foggy minutes my classmates weren’t asking me to do something. Well, maybe they did and I didn’t know! (To my former teammates: if you thought I was clueless…you were right!)
Of course with time my brain slowly got tuned to the new accent and normal order was restored. Years later when work took me to the Far East Asian countries, I found myself very quickly adjusting to the different English accents of the locals there. I wondered if my past experience played a role in that. I experienced something similar when I travelled to other parts of the world and encountered different English accents. I now firmly believe that my bi- and multicultural experience helped.
Deepak Kothavade traded Indiana for the even more un-India-like weather of Minnesota. He resides in the suburbs of Minneapolis with his wife Sharda and twin wonders Meera and Gautam.
Nice story. Even within US you notice the differences in accents. I have moved from the northeast to South and here the Hispanic accent is really difficult to understand.
Thanks for sharing your story!
Nice story!
AW
You’re absolutely right–being exposed to lots of different accents makes it much simpler to digest a new one when heard. When I was a kid, we moved around the US constantly and I was exposed to lots of different accents and colloquialisms to the point that now, I rarely even hear an accent.
Except Scottish. I can’t seem to crack Scottish.