Melting pot or salad bowl - what should we be in today's globalized work spheres?

Many years back, I went to watch a dance show, which was a jugalbandi - unity in diversity, I guess one could say, - of Kathak by Chitresh Das and Flamenco by Antonio Hidalco. If I were honest to myself, I went to watch the Flamenco (the fact that it was a highly dishy Hidalco dancing it helped, of course), because, for a long time, I have not understood the romance of Kathak, I always held Bharatnatyam and Odissi as much greater dance forms, and Kathak seemed like a kid stomping his feet in a continuous unrelenting tantrum. I had no idea about how these two - Kathak and Flamenco - could be married on stage, but the idea seemed interesting. Showed how much I knew. Lesson 1 - banish biases and stereotypes from the mind. The world is much smaller and bigger than you think.

What a show it turned out to be! And how similar the art form -who would have thought? (Clearly, some people with more brains than mine did, and thank god for that!) The two men played out their dance forms in perfect harmony and it was electrifying, pure magic on stage. Yes, the man in his waistcoat doing the flamenco was visually more appealing to me, but that's just me and my preconceived notions. Continents apart, these two dance forms, running across generations independently, and then someone thought up how similar the two were, and what he had was poetry in motion. Lesson 2 - diversity of human contact should be, and is, in many cases a given.

?A fellow parent in my son's school called us over for dinner once. He was a Caucasian American and his wife was Korean and their home was a wonderful amalgamation of both these cultures. Rich took me to his music room and he had a drum set - turns out he was good at drums. What delighted me (parochial that I am despite my international pretensions) was the sight of a tabla set. When I asked Rich whether he played them, he said he did, but he played them with wooden spatulas as he could not figure out how the palm plays it all out. The sound which came out because of Rich's efforts was not that of the tabla, sure, but it was music all right. What mattered, to me at least, was the fact that there was a man who was ready to imbibe what was good about cultures he encountered as he traveled around the world. I am so glad he is my friend. Lesson 3 - people matter, their thoughts matter, their skin colors, their food habits, their religion does not.

?When my husband was working as a Registrar at a Cambridge UK hospital, the house officer came out concerned because the lady patient, an American pilot posted with the RAF close by, wanted only to be treated by an English doctor. If you have ever lived in England you will know how difficult that might be. As it happened, my husband's unit at that time consisted of him (Indian), his Consultant (Scottish), his House Officer (Greek). The lady was told about the choice she had; she had the grace to admit the world had gone ahead while she was in her RAF colony.

?The melting pot is a term frequently used concerning the US. I prefer the salad bowl, quite honestly. Where people get to keep their independence, distinct cultures, and yet remain a cohesive lot. You might want to pick out the feta cheese or the olives from the lettuce, but the taste of the salad is in the eating of it together.

One of my earliest recollections was of these two ladies, mothers of two of my aunts by marriage, sitting and chatting with my grandmother. One was a Greek lady, did not know a word of English, let alone Bengali - and a very dominating lady she was too, smoking cigarettes while my grandmother gave occasional disapproving grunts to that; the other a Parsee, talking in a kind of English we children found funny and giggled as we heard her speak, peppered with an accented Hindi; and my grandmother, sedate, very Bengali, with her tulsi mala (Hindu rosary, I think one has to call it), counting and praying even as she spoke. She said she had a hotline with God, who did not mind the interruptions. These three ladies would be at my grandparents every winter when my uncles with their Greek and Parsee wives came over to visit (and their mums-in-law were a package deal, as they lived with my uncles in their homes); they would spend those languid winter afternoons together, never silent, somehow understanding each other perfectly, enjoying the difference as they loved the same people together. My won grandmother was your typical old-fashioned religious Bengali filled with loads of notions and beliefs and superstitions we know were wrong. But she accepted these two ladies, cigarettes, Ouzos, and wines and all, as her own and loved them to bits. That I think is the key - it does not matter who you are, what you are - what matters is that people essentially are the same inside, with the same five and a half liters of blood in them.

?My mother too, when we used to live in a place where there were a lot of British people, used to play Mahjong with our British neighbors. Two from the mahjong-playing group were Indians, my mother knew passable English, the other lady knew nothing and yet these two would-be partners to the other two ladies who were very British and Peggy Ashcroft-ish, lace hats and floral dresses, my mum and Biswas auntie were Bengali to the core, samosas, tea and all. I miss that cosmopolitanism our lives had.

?I miss Samantha coming to our house and demanding Bombay Mix (this is the posh English name for the chanachur as we know it - I found out while living in the UK) to eat while her mother was away. Now, I have seen people not even do that with neighbors, in the same city, of the same culture. Perhaps because of our cautiousness about strangers, we have allowed neighbors, close or otherwise, to remain strangers. I am a culprit about that too - singularly disinterested in other people just because they live next door.

?The world has changed in several ways. I remember the first time I had mushrooms in my childhood and I also remember the surprise I felt when I tasted it - it was a different taste from anything I had had before. My son though, accepts sushi and miso soup and wasabi as par for the course, and on days when he was a kid, wanted sushi and I couldn't find it anywhere, I made them using our rice with prawn inside - it's all interchangeable, you see. It all depends on how accepting you will be of differences. What we call churidars are essentially leggings. Even my grandmother stopped being scandalized by spaghetti-strapped tops in young ladies and would encourage me to wear shorts because she saw them as being comfortable to wear.

?It is not necessary to emulate other cultures, it's just enough to embrace differences. Nobody is expecting me to eat cockroaches and horse meat, but if others are, I need to not pass a value judgment on it. It is as right - or wrong - to have it as is mine to have chicken and yogurt. I know many who sneer at ladies' having wine at parties. The same people get drunk and misbehave some other days. Discussing which is better is a moot point.

It is not a sign of lack of culture to not bow down our heads and touch the feet of every elderly person we are introduced to; it is far better to show respect in the way we talk to them, treat them. Calling older relatives with suffixes does not mean I love or respect them more than another person from another culture who just calls them by their names. We are usually too caught up in niceties and what has historically been done. I learn every day to accept what was unacceptable even to me a while back.

?My son has come back after his graduation, having spent two years indoors doing online classes, alone in Chicago. He told us his hair was long, (reaching to this lower back) because he did not go out to get a haircut, but somewhere in that interim, he looked at the mirror and liked what he saw, and now has hair that I could kill to have. I honestly don't like it, but am OK with it and let him be because these are extremely unimportant in the larger scheme of things. And in any case, I know several wonderful people who have no skin left to be tattooed and none for rings either. I would much rather have a pony-tailed, tattooed son who had learned the right values in life than one who is all suave, hair just the way I liked, shirt tucked in, but a bad human being otherwise. He, if it came to that, will find his place and will reject what is undesirable - I will put my efforts into that. Lesson x - accept the differences, intolerance is violence.

The world is a smaller place today, and we need to shed our arrogance about our own beliefs being the right one or the best one. It is scary how much people still think along those lines and are rabid about them.

?Come to think of it, we need to also shed our arrogance that ours is the only world or planet with living beings. Who knows and with what certainty? How?