Going to India for vacations is more than just a vacation. Its an experience. I remember how I felt when I came back last year after spending nearly a month there...I felt miserable. I wrote this huge e-mail to all my friends when I came back - wondering why we felt so homesick in America. We all like our jobs, luv the higher education system here (which allowed us to pursue the degree of our choice, unlike the degree which the system chooses for you in India) - yet we all still miss the infectious atmosphere back home.
I came across an article in the NY times, and thought this explained my plight very well. Its about 4 couples in NYC who moved to the suburbs after they had children - found it extremely lonely and then moved back to NYC - an exception among cities in the US, since it forces social interaction through its public transport system. You only need to read the first page to get the idea. And swap a middle class Indian neighborhood for NYC.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/08/realestate/08cov.html
Its basically the social life which hits us hard - its too lonely here. In India everyone in the neighborhood is outside their house between 5:00 and 7:00 pm. Kids playing outside, adults chitchatting and walking around casually. Everyone relaxing from a hard days work. Everyone stopping to say hi.... its a contrast from the lonely streets here after 5:00. I live in the midwest - in my neighborhood there is a nice little park, but I have hardly seen any kids playing there. And the few who do, are supervised, and when I approach them with my son, their mother/guardian never encourages them to play together with other kids or even ask each others name! The mother never asks me who I am and where I live either.
Why? Is the average American antisocial? Is their a paranoia of some kind? I don't know my neighbors - have NEVER been to their house. We just wave at each other through car windows. There is no or very little neighborhood intermingling. Is it a surprise then that Americans have an increasing rate of depression? I talk to colleagues who reminisce the days they walked to school....but nobody does now. They blame the media for going into panic mode and blowing up all the crime statistics and as a result scaring people. Some conservative ones agree that they socialize only within their church. So do I have to convert to make friends in the US?
If we all were able to socialize more casually within our neighborhoods - and make new friends, wouldn't we all feel more a part of this society - and look forward to meeting our neighbors/friends when we came back from vacation? I have nobody in my neighborhood whom I can share my vacation pictures with...isn't that pathetic! Nobody whom I can relax with. Then why blame anyone when entire families move to the same street.
A house in Suburbia - with no company - and coming back from India - the
loneliness and the cleaning and the household chores pinch even more. In India the milkman wakes you up - and the maid is there at 6:30 am - you make your first cup of tea, and the house is already abuzz - the world is a part of your life. Here you wake up - and start things all alone in silence.
Here, if my son rides a bike - he's the only kid doing so on the desolate street. I have to supervise the entire time....its just too deserted to leave him out by himself. In India , he would run around the lanes, with all the other boys his age - and he was able to assert and experience more independence than he ever had here - and all this without me spending time, effort and money for play dates! In the meantime, I could cook, catch up with friends.... not just sit their bored watching him cycle up and down - it doesn't relax me, rather it builds up tension of not getting dinner ready in time - its more like the stress never gets a release. In India, everyone watches everyone else's kids. I found couples enjoyed more time together - not just entertaining their kids, who didn't have any friends to play with after school. Isn't that what a neighborhood should be?
The great American suburban life is merely a huge lonely journey...where everybody has to do everything alone. Socializing needs real effort, and sometimes, the work involved is more discouraging. I sincerely believe, that I can be robbed in front of my own house, and no one in my neighborhood would know till they saw it in the evening news. It sounds depressing I know - but one day, my son rode the bus home from school by mistake, and I went to pick him up at school. It took me 20 extra minutes getting home...I found him crying in front of our house. Nobody heard him - everyone was inside their airconditioned houses with all their doors and windows closed shut.
This would never have happened in India.
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