Sunday, September 14, 2008

Country Cousins

Yea observed this extreme kinship between the two countries that I can’t stop addressing them as cousins (not its people), kinship of developing countries or rather emerging countries. For the first time I realized what a developing country is. Having lived throughout my life in India (the place which for me will always remain the best) and having visited only developed countries, until this week, I didn’t really know or ignored what a developing nation is. India after all is home and it is a developing nation I never really felt that in reality, was aware of it only in theory. And now after being here and seeing the striking similarity between here and India I realize that the similarity majorly comes from the fact that even this country is a developing country. Well we will always find a bit of home any where we go but out here you can easily mistaken yourself to be walking down some coastal town of India. The streets, the town organization, the traffic, the restaurants, the corner pan shop, the beach culture (not the tanning scene of course), the sign boards, the pamphlets sticking around, the warmth of the country, the neighbors chatting on a lazy afternoon across their doors, the town square (chawk) culture, people waiting at the bus stop, the dust….every thing amazingly the same. And suddenly I realize places across the world aren’t all that different. I guess given similar circumstances, in this case both on their way to being developed the outcome has to be similar. And somewhere all this is reflected in the culture too. You might be thinking why I am posting this….truely, I am just amazed at the similarity and feeling so nice about it. As difference was expected and there surely will be lot of it but such affinity was never even thought about.

P.S. Btw the place and country in talk is Recife, Brazil.