Speak your language, not theirs

At the Kati Roll Company, we were enjoying our kati rolls, adda (conversation), and the reunion we had after a year. A group of young girls sat at the table next to us.

Soon, an oddly dressed young man joined their table. Given my ignorance about popular American fashion, I could not say if he was a style icon, or generally poorly dressed. When the girls smiled sheepishly at him, I thought that they knew each other. But the girls started to leave their table, clearly uncomfortable. They might be planning to leave anyway, but our young man surely facilitated their departure.

By now, my colleague and I were curious spectators. The man had a drawl, maybe he was drunk and stoned and anything in between. The girls left, and the man walked further inside the restaurant with confidence, calling out to more people. I could not see any further after that. I told my colleague about my disappointment that four girls could not confront a man and ran away, validating him and fueling his courage in the process.

Sometime later, the man came back to us, of all the tables. I could not understand what he said but recognized a mishmash of words that occasionally sounded like baby and boob. Sure, all babies need boobs for nourishment, but I don't think that was what he meant. I saw red! I am allergic to people calling me baby, and I didn't ask for an assessment of my boobs. He walked towards us with an intention of joining our table.

“Dada, ki bolchen bujhte parchina, Banglaye bolun,” I said out loud enough to turn a few heads in our direction. (Please speak in Bangla, I cannot understand what you are saying, I said).

The man was momentarily stunned. Of all the things he would have anticipated, a sharp reply in Bangla was outside his syllabus of imagination.

He has some nerve, he asked me to speak in English, with more references to baby and boobs. I lost it.

“Banglaye katha na bolle hobe? Boshe boshe meyeder theke khisti khachhen, bujhteo to parchen na. Ingriji te katha bolte parbo na, amake niye jokhon katha bolchen, amar bhashaye katha bolun aage.”

The more I spoke in Bangla, the more confused he got. It had never occurred to him that he would not be able to communicate to a girl something as simple as a lecherous remark about body anatomy. With a horrified expression, he started to leave the restaurant.

“Arrey paliye jachhen keno, adda maarben na?" was the last thing I said before he scampered out.

Looks like my “confuse your enemy” ploy worked wonderfully, although it was unplanned, untested, and impulsive. Whatever the guy had expected from us (shame, discomfort), being reprimanded in a foreign language was outside his imagination. This strategy might have failed if he had a gun or knife or if it was late in the night. I do not know. What I know is that in the heart of Manhattan, my mother tongue gave me the confidence to confront, confuse and belittle a man, and drive him away. I could have given him a piece of my mind in English. However, communicating and engaging with him was not my goal. Whenever you speak in the language of the enemy, you validate and empower the enemy.

Speak to your enemies and speak to them in your own language (and not their language). Chances are that the enemy will not understand your language. If they did, then they would not be enemies. I use the word “language” metaphorically here.

sunshine

No kidding

I overheard two women in a conversation, telling each other how many training sessions they have done over the summer. “Two,” said each. Then, one of them added, “Person so-and-so has done nine.” She paused briefly before adding, “She has no children, she has all the time to travel for these trainings.”

I flinched at the multiple assumptions being made here, not to mention the snarky, sarcastic tone. How many times have people assumed that I will do something because I do not have children? How many times have people seen me neck-deep in work and flippantly attributed it to childlessness? I work seven days a week, I go to work on the weekends too, and I have no hesitation or guilt about that. When people are traveling or entertaining friends, I spend my weekend conducting research. I do it because I treat my work as a passion, as my identity, and not as a 9-to-5 engagement. I take ownership of my work, treat my work as a means to a better, independent and intellectual lifestyle. I watched exactly one movie at a theater last year, I have not made any friends in the new city, and I am okay with that (I have other things to do with my time now). I don’t put in the extra hours merely because I do not have children. I could be pursuing a dozen different things, including sleeping, if I did not feel so strongly about my work.

I have often witnessed people looking down on others who haven’t prioritized procreation as their vocation. I pick on these implicit biases a little better than the next person, having been at the receiving end of it many times. Notice how an ambitious woman will be shamed because she has no children (often by other women), but not an ambitious man. A man who undertook nine trainings in a summer, children or no children, will be revered, treated as a role model, and depicted as an exemplary professional. Only a woman is a childless freak if she has enough energy to pursue the same amount of work.

There is more to observe and learn from the world around us than there is from fictitious, unrealistic movies. See if your married friends who once hung out with you are treating you differently, do not invite you home anymore, but are still hanging out with other married friends. You need to get better friends in that case. See how advertisements around you are sharing implicit messages about only one kind of life as an ideal, happy life, the one where you have a spouse, a pet and multiple children. Insurance ads. Home ads. Toothpaste ads will often show large, happy families smiling together, and so will cooking oil ads (with often the woman cooking). It looks like single people do not brush their teeth and do not cook for themselves. My two cents- don’t put your money where you are being marginalized.

See if your workplace is giving you job duties they are not giving your peers who have families. See if you are repeatedly being made a victim of micro aggression. When your boss asks you to stay in office till 9 pm, but not your peer who has children, there is a problem. When you are asked to travel at odd hours but your peers are not, you need to step back and voice your concerns. It is easy to assume that women who do not have children have all the time in the world and are hence available to take on extra responsibility at work (often without adequate compensation). Keep your eyes and ears open for such discrimination. You do not owe anyone an explanation about how you spend your time at home, why you spend your weekends working (or not working), or how lucky you are to have all the extra time in the world (an ill-conceived assumption at the least). You could be caring for the elderly, you could be grappling with a personal setback, and even if you are not, you do not owe anyone an explanation.

If people are talking about you in a different, derogatory way because you do not have children (or telling you that you will not understand because you do not have a child), if people at work are taking liberties and giving you extra work at odd hours because you do not have children, if your friends are making less of you or your interests because you do not have children, we have a problem.

sunshine

Micro-aggression 101: Your English Sucks

I teach a late night class. I usually take the 9:30 pm bus after that, but that night, I was exhausted. I had multiple deadlines that week, it was pretty icy outside and I did not want to risk a fall in the darkness. I save my Uber rides for very special occasions when I have absolutely no energy to take the bus. That day, I hired one.

My workplace to home is a mere 7-8 minute, $7 Uber ride. Naturally, there was not much time for conversation. The gentleman asked me what I do and I said that I am a faculty.

"What do you teach?" he asked me.

"Statistics," I said.

"How do your students understand you in class?" he looked quizzically.

It took a while for what was happening to sink in. It was so surreal that although it was happening, I could not believe that it was happening. I speak English in my own accent which is not quite an American accent. None of my colleagues or students has complained so far. I have given job talks, I have taught 3-hour long classes, I present at conferences every year in front of large crowds. Yet it took a chance encounter with a man I do not know to question my ability to do my job properly. I wondered if he would have asked the same question to a White, Australian man instead of a brown woman. Let me make an educated guess here. He would have found the Australian man's English cute.

I felt repulsed. That seven minute ride suddenly seemed so long. I knew I did not want to fight this battle. I took a deep breath and said, "Look, if we care so much about pure, authentic English, maybe we should all move to England."

He rambled on for the rest of the trip about how it was so funny that India had so many languages. I did not engage anymore.

A guy I do not know and am never likely to meet again questions my entire gamut of effort of years that brought me to this point where I would tell, on being asked, that I am a faculty and I teach a course in statistics. Did you know that 75% of my class consists of immigrant students, those who moved from various countries to get an education in the United States? None of their native language is English. I don't think anyone in my class has ever complained that they do not follow what I say.

These stories of marginalization and micro-aggression are not trivial. Sitting in my ivory tower and socializing mostly with people in university settings for eleven years here, I have been insulated from chance encounters like this. As a result, I always thought that the US is very liberal, tolerant and broad-minded. The reality is, the US I know of is very liberal, tolerant, and broad-minded. This man taught me an important lesson in statistics that day. My reality was heavily biased due to selective sampling, making it impossible to generalize my sample characteristics to a population setting.

sunshine