From India to UK: A journey of learning and unlearning

One would suppose that moving from India to the United Kingdom would be a smooth, bumps-free flight to a cushy life. Hardened by the struggles of daily life in India makes one assume that one has faced every conceivable practical hurdle and honed one’s survival skills to perfection. So, really, living in a more developed country should be a walkover.Besides, we follow the British system in so many aspects of daily life in India. Shouldn’t that make it even easier for us, Indians? Well, as someone who has been on that very exciting and amusing journey, from India to UK, I can say that taking the leap, half-way across the world is far from being a smooth trajectory – it is, in fact, a steep curve of learning and believe it or not, of ‘unlearning’.
Lesson number one starts at the airport, first deciphering how to make the phone in the booth work [if your mobile doesn’t work] and if that’s not taxing enough, making sense of the small coins and making the vending machine dispense what you want. Just when that is sorted, you learn an important lesson in standing in a queue for just about everything, even the toilet. Standing patiently in line even if there is one person in front of you is a hard task to master. In the beginning, it takes a good deal of mental restraint to control the urge to jump the queue and surge ahead. Standing in a long bus queue, hyperventilating, thinking that the bus will leave without you, is a test of calmness that you pass in a few weeks’ time, as you unlearn an old habit. As time goes by, as if on auto-pilot, you queue up in the oddest of places; even in the playground as you wait with your child as another child has their turn on the swing. Even at hospitals, in the accident and emergency department, people wait in queues and only in a life-threatening emergency will someone break the queue.
In the egalitarian society in UK, the workman repairing the road, the bus driver, the bin man, postman and the plumber will all say ‘hello’ or make small talk and you politely return the greeting. It can come as a shock to the system when this happens the first time as we Indians are not used to these kinds of social exchanges with people that we don’t know and sadly, with people who may not belong to our social class. Besides, you learn to accept being called by your first name by most people and you learn to address them similarly. No ‘Aunty’ or ‘Uncle’ will do. ‘Sir’ and ‘Madam’ are used in shops, planes, and restaurants but not at the workplace, which is something we have to learn to take in our stride. Of course, you have to get used to saying ‘please’, ‘thank you’, ‘excuse me’ and ‘sorry’ at the drop of a hat. In the early days, it seems very over-the-top and unnecessary. You wonder why people are saying ‘sorry’ when they come in the way of you taking a photograph on the street, why people say ‘thank you’ even if you move to one side on a narrow road or staircase to let them pass. Why it is expected that you thank the bus driver for a ticket and the lady at the till for taking your credit card and then returning it? Why do you have to say ‘thank you’ when a smile or headshake should be enough? You soon learn that just as we Indians rely on body language and facial expressions to convey our gratitude or pleasure, in UK minding your Ps and Qs is expected or else you risk being considered rude. Also, regardless of whether you are a man or woman, when you pass through a door, you are expected to hold it open for the next person behind you, just as the person in front of you did for you. With a murmured ‘Thank you’, of course!
We, in India, drive on the same side of the road as in UK, but that is where the similarities end. Driving and passing the car-driving test in the UK is a true test of unlearning all the little idiosyncrasies picked up in India. In my hometown of Pune, many traffic signal lights actually show how many seconds are left for the signal to turn from red to green, for the vehicles. Just as the last 30 odd seconds are left, the impatient vehicles behind you start honking, pressurizing you to start off, through the light is still red. These are the habits to be ‘unlearned’ as in UK, you learn to stay stationary at the red light, get ready to go at the amber light and actually only move when it turns green. You learn to pay greater attention to pedestrians at a zebra crossing and wait until they have crossed the street. In India, flashing lights at another vehicle is to assert that you want to go ahead first, which is such a contrast to what it means in UK where a car flashes their lights to let you pass or to give you way! In UK, you actually have to use the handbrake every time you halt especially at a signal or on a hill.
Not using the handbrake in this way could lead to failing the driving test. In India, the handbrake becomes a vestigial appendage like the appendix- unused and non-functional. No wonder that passing the driving test in UK is an exercise more in unlearning that in learning. Amusingly, there are laudatory greeting cards for passing the driving test in UK. And just as well, because it is not uncommon to fail a few times. The learning process continues as you grapple with figuring out how to fill petrol in your car along with checking and filling air in the tyres. No, there is nobody to do it for you. Never mind that you are a petite lady, dressed in your best work wear, struggling with windblown hair, a scarf that comes in the way and gloves that refuse to come off, you have to do what everyone else does - get your stiff, cold hands dirty and fend for yourself.
The same goes for learning to get the ice off the car using a deicer, scraper and your hands, all without being able to play damsel-in-distress- a truly hands-on training session in a practical life skill and a lesson in gender equality. Likewise, men who have perhaps never stepped into the kitchen in India are compelled to not only learn the basics of cooking, but also are soon found perfecting their culinary skills and serving up delicacies that would impress both their mother and mother-in-law, back in India. Not to mention the wife who is probably offloading heavy grocery bags from the car. With domestic help and manual labour being very expensive in UK, one has to train oneself in vacuuming, washing the dishes, scrubbing the bathtub, mowing the lawn, putting out the garbage in the wheelie bins and all the mundane household chores which one may have never done in India. DIY [Do-It-Yourself] furniture assembling, DIY painting of the house, fixing a leaking tap is at first done grudgingly out of necessity, learning out of manuals and the internet. These very same activities become exciting with time; fancy toolboxes suddenly become a man’s best friend and DIY shops a frequent haunt at the weekend.
Getting to grips with the foreign accents, slang, colloquialisms, and terms of endearment like ‘luv’ or guv’ is another learning process that comes from interacting and working with the interesting multiracial, multiethnic varied populace of UK.
One could go on and on about the learning and unlearning that are part of the passage to settling in a foreign land. Like with all learning, it is an endless, lifelong, ongoing lesson in the classroom of life and one remains a student forever.