The Patient American

The Americans have an image of being nasty and pushy around the world. They are seen as insensitive neo-colonists not just in the Islamic world but also in many other 3 world countries and swaths of Asia and Africa. Though their outward behaviour and global political ambitions may provoke such labels, I, per se, have nothing but sympathy for the lot of the average American stuck in dealing with all kinds of people from around the globe, trying to understand and make sense of their queer dialects of English and find his way to partnership with other cultures through the sticky road of Mother Tongue Effect (MTE).

The average American working for any technology company deals in his typical daily official interaction with people from Spanish, French, Chinese, Arabic, Italian, Japanese and the myriad of Indian languages (Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Hindi to name a few) speaking background, all of whom come with a rich dose of MTE.

So here is our nice average suburban American having just driven an hour and a half in peak traffic, coming from a homogenous language background and surrounded by people with all sorts of funny, strange and colourful ascents trying to understand, over IP phones (about the voice quality of which the less said the better) from teams sitting at any point of time in at least 6 different time zones around the world, how well the project is going and if we are going to stick to the schedule or is a delay imminent.

To the layman from outside US this might not appear to be mission impossible, difficult yes but not impossible, and he maybe forgiven for thinking so because nowhere else in the world such homogeneity in language exists as in the NA continent. In India, self being from there is inadvertently drawn to it for examples, you cannot travel a couple hundred miles without getting totally out of sync with what your fellow compatriots are talking about. This gives us a great ability to become sensitive to things like tonal quality and can make out the entire purport of a conversation by such dubious and non verbal methods, definitely given as long as one is aware of the context. So what do we look for, just numbers because these are not so well conveyed by the tonal qualities of the voice mentioned above.

But just when you thought that all was lost for this great nation and its people, there they come back with what must be the biggest virtue of it all, you guessed it, patience. There is an unending fountain of patience within the American soul trying to understand what the other party is saying, if you don't get it once, ask again, if not then again and again. Try try and you will succeed seems to be the motto. Though there are a number to hindrances in the path such as trains screeching in the background in Vietnam as the lead architect disembarks for his last leg of journey home and the sudden hooting of the horn on the busy Indian road to the giggle of the child on the street as the data modeller walks back from his coffee break in England the quest for the true status continues for the Americans as they try to find their way through the most globalised economy of all times.

As a great poet can always say 'With great global hegemony comes great patience in trying to understand what the rest of the world is trying to tell you and where they are viz a viz your agenda'