A couple of days back I was online chatting with Amy Melnicsak, Director of Instructional Design at DigitalThink Inc. A very warm person, she is one of those who can put you at ease completely and disarm you. Cultural differences melt instantly and you talk things that you would otherwise not talk to a "foreigner".

I had just reached office and was checking mails when Amy came online. I had received an e-mail presentation from a colleague in San Francisco and was discussing its contents with her. Three of my colleagues in the Instruction Design domain based in the US were making a presentation to the larger Learning Design Community about their experiences working with India (For many, it was a first time experience working in a distributed environment).

One of the points mentioned in the presentation spoke of “developing cultural sensitivities”. I told Amy, that the “cultural sensitivity” part is often over-rated. I told her though our religions, customs and rituals might sound/look/feel alien and weird to them, we really weren't alien to the global (American) culture. We devour just as much (if not more) of CNN and BBC as do the Americans (It is another thing, I told her that Americans get to know so little about the rest of the world). In the morning, we wake up as a "strange Indian Hindoo" with our myriad cultural eccentricities (as perceived by the West), moult to become a global worker communicating through the most advanced of modern technology. Then when the sun sinks into the western seas, we again moult to become the "strange Indian Hindoo". The emphasis on “cultural sensitivities” could therefore be a little toned down was my argument.

Amy asked me if it bothered me that global culture has become synonymous with American culture. I said that it did. What bothered me was not that American (global) culture was spreading, but that it spread by erasing other cultures. To placate me, Amy told me of a study that measured a few key parameters of performance of the US of A and found that in many a parameter, the United States was declining whereas countries like India, China, the Middle East and Brazil were showing small but significant improvements.

I told Amy that I held nothing against America and was perhaps more saddened that the middle and the upper class Indians were embracing an American lifestyle at the expense of our own culture. Coke, the cultural ambassador of American capitalism is a hit with the Indian youth, but Coke was never designed for India. An acidified (phosphoric acid) drink, Coke only throws the body's Ph factor out of sync and makes one feel thirsty. The naarial paani (tender coconut water) is the ideal Indian drink - nearly neutral in Ph and the best thirst quencher for the sub-tropical Indian climate. But very few like to hang around with a chopped tender coconut in hand. A Coke cup is flashier. This was the reason why globalization bothered me, I explained and added that I had been away from Coke and other MNC drinks for nearly 2 years to date.

This morning, I again came face to face with the issue of “cultural sensitivity” - I had posted 2 questions on http://www.straightdope.com - a site that purports to be "Fighting Ignorance since 1973 - It's taking longer than we thought”. My questions were:

(1) Which is the mountain depicted in the logo of Paramount Pictures?

(2) Why do women laugh hysterically?

The picture near the answer showed an Indian-like male (a version of the naked fakir) sitting stretched on a bed of nails and thinking about a mountain, while an Indian-like female - a gaon-ki-gori (minus her blouse) stood nearby doubling in laughter and slapping her thighs.




What bothered me was the representation of "Indian" - ill clad fakir/gaon-ki-gori types. The representation reeked of insensitivity and prejudice.

The point that the caricaturist obviously missed was - a person who had browsed the most-modern, most-liberating and most-enabling of human communication technology to send an e-mail (to an American site) had a right to expect better representation than being depicted as a semi-naked pagan.

Cultural-sensitivity is not about accepting “the other” as “the other”. It begins with accepting the “other” as “equal”.

If it still were the white man's burden to liberate the lot of the colored races from bondage - amen.

But begin by liberating us from the prejudiced representation of your visuals, of your thoughts, of your looks...

And when you begin to “sense”, “sensitivity” will follow.