Miss New India - Bharati Mukherjee [105]
In the training manual two sessions were listed under "Getting to Know the American Client" and subdivided into "Topography" and "Culture." According to the manual, knowing a language without knowing the culture was the same as knowing the words of a song but not the music.
Fifteen minutes into the first of these two sessions, Anjali's head was spinning. Wendy's Burger King McDonald's Jack in the Box Little Caesars Papa John's Pizza Hut Round Table Pizza Domino's Popeyes KFC Waffle House IHOP Taco Bell Chili's TGIF Applebee's Red Lobster PIP Kinko's Staples AAMCO AutoZone Speedy Muffler Maaco Midas Muffler Jiffy Lube United American Delta Continental Circuit City Good Guys Best Buy Office Depot OfficeMax Texaco Chevron Amoco Sunoco Arco Mobil Gulf Radio Shack Record Barn Wal-Mart K-Mart Target Costco GE (electronics) GM (cars) GM (mills) Ford Apple IBM Dell Hewlett-Packard, and every one of them with hundreds of outlets and bottom lines, like a medium-size country itself. Food, electronics, transportation, finance, and fashion: all were familiar, but they were shown to exist on a massive scale that rendered them mysterious. Banks, insurance, brokerages ... if they had warranties, returns, or breakdowns, eventually someone in India would have to deal with it. Normal Americans, apparently, could name all those national companies and dozens more but did not have personal contact with any of them.
Parvati assured the students on the first day of classes that for every problem, CCI had a tailor-made solution. But Anjali couldn't imagine a company taking a chance on her.
She asked, "Why all these Shacks, Huts, Barns, Cabins, and Alleys? What self-respecting company would call itself a hut or a shack? Why not Mahals and Palaces?"
Parvati had an answer for that too. "Large corporations are alienating. Calling them shacks and huts is a cheap way of humanizing them. When U.S. consumers hear of a Palace or a Mahal, they only think of a Chinese or an Indian restaurant."
In the "Culture" session, Parvati showed one episode each from three popular TV sitcoms, so her students would be familiar with them in case customers referred to characters in Friends or Seinfeld or Sex and the City. Recognize the clients' references; show appreciation for their notion of humor. Anjali didn't find any of them funny.
The TV episodes depressed her. All the characters were surrounded by friends. Anjali had no friends; she had fellow tenants, contacts, mentors. She'd never had a friend, no one she really liked and could bring to her home, or missed when she was out of town, or wished she could get together with to share secrets, as Elaine Benes and Carrie Bradshaw did. Her only friend had been Sonali-di, up to the time of Sonali-di's wedding. She hated these characters; she envied them. Bright and bouncy Carrie didn't work as hard at her job as Sonali-di did, but she still had enough money to splurge more on silly, strappy high heels in one afternoon than Sonali-di made in half a year. Life in India was so unfair.
Most weeknights she lay in bed, going over assigned chapters from the CCI reader. The chapter she had most trouble with was titled "Specialized Language of the Football Gridiron, the Basketball Court, and the Baseball Diamond." She memorized alien phrases that promised to unlock deep mysteries of American English and the psyche of the American consumer. It wasn't easy to visualize a "full-court press" or, for heaven's sake, a "blitz." Why was "knocking the cover off the ball" a good thing to do? How did "throwing a curveball" indicate "an unexpected degree of difficulty"? Then there was "knocking it out of the park." That too was a good thing. But "Grab some pine!" was not. "Stealing a base" and "painting the corner" were commendable. "Flooding the zone" had nothing to do with monsoons. "The bottom of the ninth" had something to do with desperation.