Khanna Kazana (Treasure of Food)

I'm Indian.

We use turmeric in our food. It might stain your fingers yellow for an hour. It will definitely stain your clothes if you drop food on them. I don't think it smells. Why do you? 

Being a foreigner might be one the hardest things to do in life. I wouldn't really know. I practically grew up in this country, but I still understand some of the things that foreigners go through. When my parents got to this country, it was like they were on a whole new planet. The clothes were shorter, the hair was longer, and men didn't have mustaches! They adjusted. They live in this country now, as if they have lived in this country forever. My parent's accents aren't as strong anymore, and I don't even have one. If there is anything that makes me different from others, it's probably my food.

I remember when I was younger, my mom would give me Indian food rolled up in some chapati which is pretty much like a Mexican tortilla. Indian food has a different smell and some people don't like it at all. Kids at that age can be pretty vicious. They hated the smell of my food and they wouldn't be shy about telling me about it. For the first time, I felt like I was different from my peers. I became self-conscious about what I ate at school. I went to my mother about what they said and she told me that she had no problem in giving me peanut butter and jelly everyday, but was that what I really wanted? She knew how much I liked eating our native food and she knew that I wouldn't enjoy eating a sandwich every single day. She asked me if the food in the cafeteria sometimes made my nose wrinkle. I told her that the smell of bacon and beef sometimes made me feel nauseous. She just gave me a pointed look and said "If their food can smell, why can't ours?" From that day on, I didn't care that kids made fun of me for the way that my food smelled. As I got older, the less people there were to call me out on it. Now, my friends will eat my own food and leave theirs alone. My sister is different. Like me, she got made fun of for her Indian food and though my mother told her the same thing she told me, my sister decided to bring sandwiches to school instead. 

The smell of some meats still makes me feel like puking my guts up. I don't like it. I probably won't ever eat it, but I wouldn't tell someone that their food stunk any day. It's their food. If they enjoy it, let them. Indian food does have a strong scent but I didn't understand then, and even now, why people would comment on something that didn't really concern them. Food is universal. But food is different in every culture and that can cause some serious divides. 

The Super Massive Black Hole that is Costco

Today, my family and I went to Costco after I came home from Kumon. For the first time, I realized just how much Americans bulk buy. Costco is a wholesale store. Obviously they sell everything in bigger amounts. But how many bags of chips does one person need! I saw a woman with three boxes of the little bags of chips. It was sort of ridiculous.

Don't even get me started on my family. We'll go into Costco for some milk and bananas, and we'll come with milk, bananas, fruits, taquitos, pizzas that no one will eat for about 6 months, cookies, chairs, a couple of books, and sometimes, when we're being really rebellious, movie tickets. When you go into Costco, you never spend any less than 50 bucks. It's unheard of. I don't think that in other countries, stores like Costco exist. Usually the quantity in foreign countries is pretty small. So why in the world do Americans buy SO. MUCH. STUFF?

I think one part of it is the samples that Costco gives out. Who can resist free food?!?! So then, you'll go and  try out this free food and realize you like whatever it is their selling and you'll ending up buying the heart attack in box. Then you'll go home, eat it for a day, and then realize that you never really liked the food in the first place. So, it'll sit in your fridge for six months until your mom forces you to eat it, or she just gives up and throws all of it out, promising to never buy you anything again.
Moral of the story? Food samples are nicely wrapped packages that taste divine sent from the devil himself. Never have them.

Anyways, food sampling is probably one of the reasons that people spend so much money at Costco. Another reason? The fact that Americans eat a lot of food. My family is Indian. We have small stomachs and this is a fact. We'll go to an Italian restaurant  order two dishes for the four of us, and we'll still have leftovers. If you look at what others eat, they'll order three appetizers, then one dish per family member, and then they'll clean everything off with dessert. And no leftovers. Now I'm not saying that every American eats a lot, or that every Indian eats so little, I'm just stating what I've seen. So maybe that's a reason why Americans bulk buy. But that doesn't explain why my family (who we've already established doesn't each much of anything)  still buys over 100 dollars worth of food when we only really need maybe 45.

The answer may be laziness. Don't want to go to the grocery story every single week? Just buy a whole bunch at once and you're set for the rest of the month! My family definitely does this and I have a feeling that many Americans probably do too. Costco (and Walmart, but that's a different story) is a godsend for those lazy people who just hate going to the grocery store. Bulk buying to the rescue!

So we have food samples, big eating and laziness all as factors to why Americans buy so much in bulk. Who knows why we really do. It's the way of life here, but it's certainly a strange sort of thing to do. 

The Evil Clutches of Kumon

I work at Kumon on Sundays from  11 to 1. It's a tedious job (all I do is grade worksheets. It's taught me to never become a teacher), but at least I get something out of it right? I remember as a kid, never, ever wanting to do Kumon. It sounded like torture to a 5th grader (actually it still sounds like torture.) Kumon is pretty much doing math and reading worksheets under a time limit. There is also a whole lot of repetition involved, and being taught what you're learning? Forget it. My mom's friend owns the Kumon place where I work and when I explained to her why most kids hate Kumon and refuse to do it, she said that people in other countries have very different views on the Kumon work.

Kumon originated in Japan. It was made for Japanese kids, and somehow, the business worked its way to America. The point of Kumon is to have the math or reading skills programmed into your mind, so most of the time, kids will be doing the same worksheet five or six times over just to make sure the material sticks. The worksheets have to be done under a certain time, otherwise the child is not allowed to pass to the next level. Kumon is also a sort of self study. When a new concept is introduced, a small part of the worksheet is designated to teach the child what to do. But the method absolutely sucks. I did Kumon for a while right before I started high school. It helped at first. I knew what I was doing in the beginning and it really made me faster at the math. However, when the new concepts were introduced, I was totally and utterly lost. I spent more of my time looking in the answer book than actually trying to work out the answer. And this made me feel dumb and incompetent  So, I quit. There was no need for Kumon anyway. I was doing great in school, what was the point of the extra "tutoring"?

A lot of American kids feel this way. As soon as it gets tough, we start quitting. The kids in Japan, they will sit there and do the worksheets diligently for six hours if they have to. We don't have that patience to learn. We are a mostly hands on country. Looking at a worksheet and trying to figure out how to solve the problem just doesn't work for most of us. We need to be taught. Kids in Japan don't need that. So Kumon works for them. Most of the kids who come into Kumon are Asian  Every now and then, there will be an American child, but they don't last long. Usually they'll transfer to another agency like Sylvan. Kumon is torture to American kids. But to those kids in Japan? It's like homework. You have to be the best of the best, otherwise in the race of life, you'll fall behind.

This doesn't mean that the average American  doesn't work. It just means we don't work the same way as others in different countries. I want to know how that even happened. How did we as a country, become so addicted to being taught? 

Laughter is the best medicine?

I was at the World Quest competition this morning at the University of Delaware Wilmington Campus. A question in our current events section came up asking about the name of the idiot who jumped out of a capsule in space. Everyone chuckled at the idiot comment and I was struck by the fact that we find pain in others kind of funny. Take America's Funniest Home Videos as an example. Almost every single video on there has to do with someone hurting themsleves in some kind of way. I'm not going to lie. It's funny as heck to see people hurt themselves but why do we do it? Do we simply ignore the fact that someone may have gotten seriously hurt, or do we just not care? The guy that jumped out of the capsule, was he wearing a parchute? Did he survive? Was he injured? Was he in the hospital? We don't ask these questions when we see a video of someone who has hurt themselves. We laugh. Of course if  the accident had happened right in front of us, we probably wouldn't have laughed. We probably would have rushed to see if the person was okay. So what makes watching people hurt themselves on tv so funny? Why doesn't it scare us like it would have if it was happening right in front of us?

I've also noticed that America as a whole finds crude humor to be very, very funny. My odyssey team decided to take a break during our meeting today and watch Kingsly and Jenna Marbles videos. I don't know if you have ever seen these videos, but they're on Youtube and the videos get more than a million views a week. Why do people watch them? Because they're funny. This afternoon was only the second time that I had ever seen a Jenna Marbles video and I didn't get the appeal. Yeah, sometimes she said something that was sort of funny, but I was turned off by the crude language that she used. Kingsly is the same. Comedy movies do the same thing. American comedy movies today usually have dirty humor in it. Not always, but most of the time they do. I don't usually find that funny. I don't laugh. Does that make me weird? I don't think so. I guess I just don't like that kind of humor.

Laughing is always good. It really is the best kind of medicine, but why do we laugh at things that we probably shouldn't laugh at? Why do we laugh when people get hurt, why do we laugh when a dirty joke is said, why do we laugh when we people curse? I laugh when America's Funniest Home Videos is on. I even laughed in the Hangover and goodness knows that that movie was full of crude humor. But I didn't laugh while watching the Dictator. Humor is different here. We laugh at the weirdest things sometimes. But, I guess that's just a part of our culture.