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Everyone Gets Candy
The custom in India is to bring candy to work when it's one's birthday...at least, that's what one of my colleagues told me(!)
Pat said, "You should have told them that in the United States, on people's birthdays, it's customary for them to receive $20 bills from everyone in the office."
I do recall my friend Deepak, sharing a marvelous story of living and working in Bangalore and giving out candy on his birthday, conditionally. He was at IBM at the time and wrote e-mail to his department, letting them know that it was his birthday and also coming out as gay, and saying that if they were all right with his news, they were welcome to come get some candy. Everyone came and got candy.
Visibility and Voice
Today, I interviewed a manager and she spoke of the role that marriage plays in a number of women's rise (or not) in corporate careers in India. I said, "I'm not single, and my partner is female and it definitely feels like we're highly unusual here."
She responded, "In India, I think there's some denial around what you just described."
I think she's right. If we get the rental that we're hoping for, the realtor told us, in order to pay one club-house fee, rather than two, "Tell them you're sisters." Let's just say that one of us would have had to have been adopted for us to pass as sisters.
It's another good time to remind myself that no one's culture is better or worse than another's. They're just different from one another's.
In today's "The Times of India," Pat found an article, "Lesbian pair disowned by families" in New Delhi. Geeta and Babli met at the wedding of their siblings five years ago.
On Sunday, when they told their families that they had gotten married (at an Arya Samaj temple in Delhi) that day, their families disowned them.
The article ended relatively happily from my perspective: Geeta called the cops and all of the families were taken to the police station. "The police, however, said they could do nothing if the girls wished to live together as they were both adults" (p. 10).
Both Pat and I will celebrate our birthdays here. Hers is on September 19th. More candy for whoever we're with that day.
The best present would be if my electric tooth-brush charger magically appeared. Sigh.
12 comments:
HAPPY BIRTHDAY Sarah. This is your first Birthday in India. Wonder what special thing you could do. May be visit a Hindu temple :-) I visit a temple and a church on my birthday which ever is easily accessible. Hence my recommendation :-)
I bet you will have a party with you friends in Bangalore... by now I am sure you have collected a large number of friends and fans in Bangalore :-) Once again, Happy Birthday. Wish you a very happy and fulfilling life ahead.
Here is another take on homosexuality in India.
I have an uncle in my family who is gay . Lives in UK now. He has had his share of discrimination in his early life belonging to a conservative family and society. However, today he is happy and is a loved member of our family. My son is very close to him and it fills my heart with joy to see how much of a void my son fills in his life.. that of not having a child of his own.
So all families in India are not like the one in Delhi. There are people here who are open.
To me, it has more to do with what / who the individuals in the family are. But yes, I do agree with the manager.. that there is some amount of denial.... are we all not living in some denial or the other.. be it that of sexual orientation / religion / just pure unconditional love !!!
Dear Sarah,
Happy Birthday!!! Yom huledet sameach, yom huledet sameach, yom huledet sameach, yom huledet sameach!!!
Could you please email me with a phone number where we can reach you?
I love your candy story. And the Delhi couple story. And I love Ishita Bardhan for the warmth he sent you, my beloved sister. The irony is that when I see the support that your colleague in Bangalore received, or the young women got from the police, or that you got from Ishita, I get teary and think, "There is a god." A god, as expressed in acts of loving-kindness and righteousness. Then I remember that people are setting off car bombs and shooting little girls in Afghanistan or hunkering down with caches of weapons in white supremacist communities praying for the "Rapture," when people like you and me would be consumed in flames for being infidels, because of our sexual orientation and/or religious identification. And they're doing this in the name of their gods. God help us.
I love you so much.
Kathy
Ishita, this is a nice birthday present -- hearing from a colleague and friend that some Indian families, including yours, are accepting of their gay relatives. I didn't know for sure -- and that's the neat part of meeting people from other cultures face-to-face: My friend Sarah Holland says, "The individual is the enemy of the stereotype."
Kathy, Ishita is a woman on my team here, not a guy. And I love you, too! It's weird, speaking with all of you in the family only once a week. Pat's taking me out for a special dinner tonight, so we'll try to call you after. It'll be too late when you want to call here. You're writing about macro love and hate, in the world, and today, I was thinking about micro love and hate, that is, when I behave lovingly, I am rewarded with openness and love back. When I behave impatiently or am cranky, I attract dislike at a minimum.
Behaving lovingly at a micro level influences the macro level, I'm confident.
Rarly, I have been thinking about you all day today, having your birthday in India. Happy Birthday! I hope it's been truly grand.
I love Pat's comment - that's hysterical. And it reminds me of one of my favorite Cheryl Wheeler moments, at the A2 Folk Festival at Hill years ago when she was MCing:
"Cheryl's nice, she made this song up for us/If we're good, she'll let us sing the chorus./She's so nice, she hardly ever hollers/Each of us will give her fifty dollars... (expectant look)...twenty dollars...(expectant look) ...some money."
Love you!!
Marn
Happy happy birthday to you Ms. Siegel. I remember celebrating the 19th, almost non-teenth with you and your mom and sisters on the back porch. Wishing you and Pat and family all good things in the year ahead.
Marni and Scott, so nice to hear from both of you on the day!
Scott, my mom still lives in the house where I grew up, and we still eat on the back-porch when it's warm outside.
I can see sun, dappling the woods and at the start of them, the huge bushes of raspberries that grow wild every year, about a month from now.
Oy, now, I'm a bit homesick.
Belated Happy B'Day wishes. Nice to hear that you still recollect my coming out experience in IBM.
How is life treating you in Bangalore. I saw the pictures in Pats blog.
If you get time , you should make plans to visit Kerala. Expecially if you like backwaters and beaches
Actually, we want to go to Cochi, which is also on the coast, and where the Jews of South India lived; there's a synagogue there from 1568. We're not really beach people.
Apologies to Ishita for getting her gender wrong. Oops. Given how open-minded she seems to be, I hope she didn't mind.
We're on our way to a Balkan dance party at an apple orchard upstate. "I hope you dance" through your "birthday season."
Week two at work felt pretty great, actually. Where the challenge of the work freaked me out initially, I'm kind of jazzed by it now. Flip side, I am totally exhausted today. I've got to figure out how to fit a little more sleep in.
Love,
Kathy
PS, I also thought's $20.00 comment was priceless. An you're right, our personal power can have an amazing ripple effect. What more can any one soul do? I love you.
Oh yeah... Scott... Was I at the same 19th birthday party? I'd have been twenty four or five, right? I don't remember that one.
Yes. That is a must visit for you. One of my previous client manager was also talking about visiting kochi for the same reason.
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