East Made Friends
 I made a handful of non-U.S. friends over the course of the past two weeks. The entrepreneurship study abroad last year visited a professor in Korea who happened to be leading a group in Delhi the same time we were there last week, so we had dinner at the Radison one night and then saw them at the Taj Mahal the next day. I spoke a while with Moon Jeong, who taught me pidgin Korean. She owns a costume shop in Seoul that you can see at mjhanbok.com. Dr. Nathan figured anytime I went missing for the rest of the trip, I must have wandered off with Koreans somewhere.
By the time we arrived in Chennai, most people had experienced digestive problems, to put it gently, and had converted to whatever Western food could be found. I must have eaten at Pizza Hut three days in a row. After one sitting, we walked back to the hotel and headed up to the roof on a whim, having heard there was a restaurant where we might sit and enjoy an afternoon beer (if Indian beer could possibly be enjoyed) and take in the sights of the city. Jon and I noticed a few light stands in the hall as we got off the elevator, which seemed out of place, but found that a movie was being shot another floor up in the restaurant. We were still able to work our way around to get to the outside terrace. The view was grand. We commented on how similar the city looked to the Mediterranean, that we could be looking out over a Greek coastal city and hardly tell the difference. After a short time, a group of guys came out to the terrace and lounged at a few tables in one corner. I  eventually approached them and sat for a while, speaking about our study abroad group, about the United States, and asking questions about India. They were particularly interested in women and alcohol. Only the former is widely available in India. Their eyes gaped wide open when I told them hundreds of beers were available in the U.S. They were also surprised to hear that at 26 I was neither married nor subject to arranged marriage. The way they described arranged marriage, though, it seemed to be less binding and more a matter of preserving tradition. They weren’t necessarily expected to marry the first girl chosen for them, so there is still a “shop around” element in modern Indian mating culture. It’s difficult for me to get a sense of how different we are from them, but they were clearly skeptical or maybe incredulous of meeting women at the bar, the bookstore, in class, or at work and casually dating without familial participation. Of course, I took some abuse from them. Some would make jokes in Tamil and then burst out laughing at me, but it was in good fun and they were very receptive, if only a little derisive. I anyway felt very welcome and have very good feelings about people of India.
 The night after the Great Lakes School of Management exchange, a handful of students came to the Savera for drinks and discussion. I can’t possibly recall the names of the few with whom I spoke, but as I understand them, it seems that Indians are not very different from Americans. Perhaps 700 million of so of them are, but among the educated youth with strong family backgrounds, what you find is Indians who want for themselves and expect of themselves many of the same things Americans do. I have spoken to a number of foreigners in the United States and many are satisfied with a very basic level of comfort and income. I thought it was almost exclusively American to consider the bigger picture of society and live far and beyond basic sustenance to discover easier and more efficient means of living and producing things that are necessary for more and more people to live happily with fewer and fewer resources. Of course, there have always been people in every large-scale society that do that no matter what, its precisely why they are wealthy, but culturally I believed it to be almost exclusively American. Unfortunately, while there is a trend in popular culture to discourage intellectualism in favor of aesthetic prowess and hedonism in U.S., our powers of innovation and pushing the envelope are nonetheless vibrant. This should only be enhanced in the decades to come with the competition of India and China, competition we sorely need. As a speaker at Reliance Communications said, 3 Americas is better than one.
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