More Culture Shock
Posted on September 2nd, 2007 by Niket
- Two words that need to be banned are ”yes sir!” The answer to any question is “yes sir.” However impossible a task it, “can you do it” will always yield a “yes sir” response.
- You spend 30 minutes explaining something to a student. Every time you ask him is he is following you, he says yes. Half an hour later, you realize that he hasn’t even understood the first sentence.
- This is related to the above point. It didn’t happen to me. A colleague spends 20 minutes explaining the research project and his experimental setup. Student replies, “but sir, I am not interested in theory; I want to do experiments.” *&%^$#!
- You go to the SBI branch to open an account or activate your internet banking. You get handed a form to fill, with instructions to fill it at leasure and come in the next day. You don’t want to waste more of your time, so you fill in the form and meet the same person 15 minutes later. He takes the form, and coolly tells you “come tomorrow.” Period. End of story.
- An old geezer gives you a lecture about “respecting elders.” Translation: toe the line or you will be shown your place. Thankfully (and touchwood :-)) this hasn’t happened in the Chem Engg department.
When you need to get something done in your lab, the estate office sends one of its staff members to assess your needs and “assist” you in getting them done. You ask this person, “can this and this and this be done?”. Usually, that person’s response — in a certain elite research institution, of course! — is “Yes sir. Impossible sir.”
When these two sentences are spoken so fast that they are seamlessly bound, their impact on the victim is, um, priceless!
Sir,
Students will be students :-). Saying ‘yes sir’ for everything would be a ..umm.. ‘diplomatic’ answer I guess :)..
[…] One of the reverse cultural shock I had (have?) most difficulty adjusting to after returning to India is the concept of being respectful. The term respectful, in their minds, was a world apart from what I would deem as respectful. I was advised in my first month in office that some of the young faculty educated in the western countries are not respectful of their elders. I have blogged about this before. […]
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