Friends

I think I've just started to make friends at work =) Haha, that sounds odd, doesn't it? Today, a little after noontime, a girl named Alaka who works for the same boss, in the next cube over, came up to me and said, "So.. you must be lonely, yes?" and asked if I wanted to go to lunch together later. I was initially taken aback at her frankness -- I had been resentful earlier this morning about finding out only now that I'd be the only intern in Chennai for the next few weeks, while there's a whole crowd of 'em at Bangalore -- but I appreciated it, after thinking it over for a while. She clearly meant well, and it's not that big of a deal to admit that I would like some human company. Har.

Anyhow, Alaka introduced me to her whole crowd of Bengali friends, so now I know a whole bunch of Bengalis! They're a funny crowd. From Calcutta, the same as Amartya Sen (<3)! All guys, except Alaka, so I guess she might enjoy having another girl around as well. Jokes abound... apparently, a "fag" is a smoke, but also a homosexual. I misunderstood Alaka today when she exclaimed at Arunavan (sp), "A fag!" when he motioned that he'd catch up with us later -- I thought she'd called him a fag, and I was like.. ouch, haha. I asked her if she really called him a fag, and through a series of gestures and laughs, I found out that she'd thought I'd thought she'd called him a homosexual, when she had really been disapproving of his going out to take a smoke. Lawls. Lost in translation, indeed.

Hello, my name is [ ]

I've been spoiled @ H. People generally pronounce my name right at school, as opposed to wrongly when I'm at home in Silicon Valley. There, my name meets blunder upon blunder through a range of accents and attempts to Latinize it, so I was actually not used to having my name correctly pronounced before I went to H. Anyhow, it's being slightly (but not annoyingly) butchered here in India.. oh well, haha. I am slowly growing accustomed to hearing and comprehending Indian English, including people's names. I feel bad whenever I ask people to repeat their names (which is oftentimes the case), and then they smile and tell me to call them by a nickname. And then I insist on calling them their actual names b/c I don't want them to feel bad or like they have to shorten/simplify their name to suit the disobedient tongue and cognitive abilities of a foreigner. Yaaar.

Today, I found out that the guy who cleans my room is from Orissa. Whoops. Totally thought everyone here was Tamil.. I guess not. I asked him if he spoke Tamil, and he gestured, just a little. Anyway, he remembered from our previous conversation that I'm half from Singapore. I was surprised. That was pretty impressive. Anyhow, he asked if people in Singapore speak Tamil or English. I chuckled, and told him both. And then he mentioned something about Singaporean theatre being in Tamil, haha. That's cool, I'd no idea.

Goal of the upcoming week: figure out the cleaning guy's name. I figure, if I'm going to see him about a fair amount, I should learn his name. Same with the guesthouse security guard and the security guards of the building I work in, as well as of the Infy campus. I think they pretty much all know me already. Not that I'm being arrogant; actually, I'm kinda hard to miss. I'm the token Asian girl here, haha. Literally. It's still somewhat of a culture shock, seeing all people only of one race. Sure, there's diversity in terms of language/physical features/clothing, but it's definitely different compared to the U.S., where everyone from the onset looks visibly distinct. It really takes a skilled/experienced set of eyes/ears (which I don't possess) to distinguish between all the various languages here.

Back to the cleaning guy - I wonder how life must be for him here, and if he'd migrated for economic reasons. That brought to mind a thought: job creation is imperative for economic development. Infrastructure development and education and healthcare and whatnot (all cool things that I get to address and look into with my internship -- very exciting stuff that warrants a post on its own) is well and necessary, but how to facilitate all that as well as job creation? For what ends do we work?