An Indian view of Americans, hopefully busted

An out of sequence event that I wanted to post before I forget it. Today is my next-to-last full day in India, and the head of my lab took me out to lunch with a big group of managers and a few engineers to keep me company :-) It was very nice of her, and I enjoyed the lunch! We took a bus (more later) to the restaurant, which appeared to be a converted old house on beautiful grounds. We sat outside, but it was shaded and had fans so the temperature was reasonable.

But what I wanted particularly to tell you about was a comment made by the lab manager. I was sitting beside her and people had asked about my family, and about my sick mother-in-law. I told them about how much I missed my family and how happy my mother-in-law was that she was having two additional great-grandchildren. And she turned to one of her managers nearby and said something like "See, we are wrong about Americans. The DO care about their families."

I was a bit surprised, but not too. However, she explained to me that Indians tend to think that Americans don't care much about their families. They can't wait to leave the nuclear family when they grow up, parents don't live with children, etc. But she said that she could tell from what I was saying that we DO care about our families, and multiple generations of our families, just in a different way.

Fascinating...

Oh, about the bus: My company has fleet of busses to transport employees to and from work. They ply certain routes at communte time, but are idle during the day. So apparently anyone can "charter" a bus to take a group of people to lunch. Usually the limit is 4Km, but I guess they made an exception today...our place was further than that!