On Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 10:21 PM, Stephanie Whiting <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I got the welcome mail asking me to introduce myself, I'm Stephanie Whiting > and I am a 24 year old American citizen, who intends to move and settle in > Kolkata, India in around a year's time as I have met and fallen in love with > an Indian guy. Right now I am working on finishing my bachelors degree in > Criminal Justice, with no idea what to do with it.
Stephanie, Welcome to Silk. Congratulations on the planned wedding (and graduation and move....) Having straddled the globe with one limb in India, another in the US with occasional forays into SE Asia and East Africa for 15 years, my advice on retaining sanity: Keep an open mind. Resist the urge to pass judgment. Take small, concrete steps to change the things you do not like. And when you are frustrated by an alien system (as you inevitably will be from time to time), try and look at the glass that is half-full. Change what you can. Let what you cannot change go. Be kind and gentle to others, and equally importantly, to yourself. I confess that these are all platitudes. And hopefully you can look back at this thread in a couple of years and the (unsolicited) advice given sounds more specific. I am reminded of a USian friend of mine who spent a year on the hippie trail in India. I asked her what her thoughts were as she was about to leave. "I am surprised it works," she said. Thaths -- "I saw this in a movie about a bus that had to SPEED around a city, keeping its SPEED over fifty, and if its SPEED dropped, it would explode. I think it was called, 'The Bus That Couldn't Slow Down'." -- Homer J. Simpson
