THE NRIs .....

After travelling to most of the hot hubs for opportunity ..this is something I observed out of my sheer curiosity about Indians in foreign land.

Most of us including me ofcourse, NRIs, strive to blend in into their foreign society. It’s amusing to observe some of the measures we undertake:

We start rolling our “r”s. unfortunately we can never pronounce Rs like the natives do. So we end up sounding as if we had some vocal cord deformity.

Most us who never wore shorts in life start wearing shorts as soon as we enter the foreign land, choosing completely to ignore the visual abomination we perpetrate. Indians who venture into wearing shorts should take a look at themselves in the mirror. If ones legs look like bamboos with hair on them, one must avoid shorts at all costs.

Start following local sports such as football. Then we discuss these sports loudly with the localities at the water-cooler as if we have been watching these sports all our life

Try our hand at wit and make jokes when in a group. Humour is a very cultural thing. Unless practised with caution, it often ends up with a bunch of blank stares in one’s direction.

Start using profanity. We used to say “What the hell, yaar!” Now we say “What the fuck”. We think using the language employed by plumbers and construction workers takes us one step closer to being native!

Start drinking beer. Half my friends who drink beer never drank alcohol before. Now they drink beer to look cool at a party.

When a new comer to Germany says “First floor” to refer to second floor, that is, the one floor above ground floor, we act all confused and lost.

When at meetings, we put our feet up on the table/chair and we keep them there no matter who else in the cube/meeting room, just to prove to ourselves that we are cool.

Start pronouncing my name as Sand-iya.. rather Sandhya... or short it down to Sandieeee...!

“Most of us” does not mean “all of us.” Not all NRIs exhibit aforementioned symptoms and not all of them exhibit all the symptoms.