Discord-side Chats: P1, The Rishining

This title is a blatant reference to good old Franklin Roosevelt's famous series.

I have made many friends online in my day, some fleeting, some have been friendships that I'll have for the resto of my life. But thus far, despite knowing some of them for 5+ years I have only met one. His name is Rishi, and funnily enough we lived about 20 minutes from each other for well over 2 years and just didn't know. I was assigned a project to interview someone with a multicultural background, and it just so happened that this friend was born in India, so it only seemed right to interview my friend about his bicultural identity. The interview was pretty wild, if you could listen to the raw interview you would hear my guinea pigs squeaking in the background. It was an extremely professional interview, just take my word for it.

I proverbially sat down with him last night to pick his brain over a discord call. It was pretty enlightening. We had been hanging out, playing some good old fashioned Rocket League before and after, and the interview just kinda started there.

Before jumping into it, I want to start with a bit of a premise. I decided to interview Rishi partly due to my own friendship with him, but India was occupied by the British much like the U.S. was. the groups just separated at different times, and have had different cultural values. So comparing the two through the lens of someone who has lived in both is an extremely interesting concept.

I started with the basics, I have had zero experience with other countries, I have been outside of the U.S. once or twice, and for the first time I was hardly sentient. I can only remember eating Marvel branded Oreos in a hotel room. I asked about how different life in the U.S. was from living in India. Rishi had pretty in depth knowledge on life in both Indian cities and in Indian Villages.

"So, village life is about as different as it could possibly be. I mean, if we’re talking about spectrums of development it’s on the opposite end. The town would probably be comparable to a very mildly developed, little town over in the Midwest".

I wasn't super shocked by the similarities between India and the U.S., but I was shocked by life in an Indian village. Rishi mentioned that they have about 2 hours of unreliable electricity, foot long scorpions, and slim access to vehicles and medical treatment.

On top of the general differences of living in one country or the other, I asked about the average extroversion level between the countries. I'm a communication studies major so that kind of stuff is pretty interesting to me. Rishi said, India was more extroverted, yet not as open. Meaning that people were extroverted there, but genuine connections and information exchange is much less common.

We also took a look at the power difference between the U.S. and India, and Rishi was a bit shocked by the results. He was shocked that India didn't have a higher power difference. "It should definitely have a higher power difference" Rishi said, in relation to southern India.

In general, the best way to facilitate communication between individuals from U.S. culture and individuals of Indian culture seems to be through genuine conversation. Rishi mentioned "There is no such thing as a separate online persona, you are who you are in India. If you're caught trolling, or misleading, you'll be roasted.". Another method of communication would be focusing on the extraversion that both cultures share.

So, to summarize, the best way to communicate with Indian individuals as an American is to communicate genuinely over the internet, and to be as extroverted as possible during the conversation to better make the conversation feel more genuine.