Multicultural Adaptability

Most IT folks from India travelling abroad for the first time would have had the experience of attending some kind of course to make them aware of the cultural diversity between countries and help them adapt to the new culture. It is quite interesting to note that even people in US get trained to appreciate the culture of the Desi folks they would be working with. A colleague of mine once explained how the course helped him in understanding certain things about India and Indians. It was pretty nice except for few things that he said that were not applicable to India. Seems his instructor told him that whenever he had to eat in an Indian's home then he had to leave some food unconsumed in the plate to indicate that he was full and satisfied. I have always known the Indian etiquette to make a person complete his food in entirety. In my first company there was a manager who used to tell me, "In a country where there is a pocket of people not having enough food to keep them active, wasting food should be made a criminal offense". Not that I waste anything, but then I was managing the social welfare committee of the organization and this dialogue came while discussing about the possibility of transporting the unused food in our cafeteria.

Coming back to the multicultural training given to the US people, some of my colleagues recently attended one of those trainings. I was very curious on what they learnt about India and enquired about it. I shocked to hear, "If we had not heard about India from you, then we would have believed all of what the trainer said". Seems the trainer was neither a person from India who would know the country, nor an American who would better appreciate the cultural difference. The trainer had showed some clips of India, all from the places exhibiting poverty. Just few weeks back I had shown my colleagues my presentation on India that we presented in a local school. After watching the natural splendour in my presentation, they were bewildered at the pictures shown to them in the training. I was heartened to hear from them that they understand that every country in the world has places with poverty. I was even more heartened to hear them appreciate the respect given to elders in India. A colleague said, "I give respect to elders, but am still instantaneous in my replies to them. May be if I had followed your culture, I would be more organized and thoughtful over my words". Definitely a different way of looking at things.

Most of my colleagues understood that they cannot generalize any set of people. A simple example quoted by them was the difference between the people in the east coast and west coast of US. Everyone's different, and my colleagues have a better understanding probably because my team has had people from the east, west and south of India. They recognize each of us to be a different kind of person, and I recognize them the same way.