Friday, July 13th, is My Birthday

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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.