I work at a company that employs (like a lot of American companies these days) a very large number of south-Asian subcontractors.\u00a0 Most of them come from one rather large Indian vendor.\u00a0 And that vendor threw a little “Understanding India” session for us a few weeks back.<\/p>\n
It was interesting, of course; other cultures fascinate me, India more than most.\u00a0 I grew up around a fair number of South Asians in North Dakota (it’s a long story), and had some exposure to the culture.\u00a0 Still the vendor session was fascinating.<\/p>\n
And frustrating; to try to explain a culture as old, broad, multifaceted and complex as India in 90 minutes was a little like – well, trying to explain cricket to Americans.<\/p>\n
And then I thought; how would I explain America to a foreigner new to the country?<\/p>\n
Not all the usual “civics in ten minutes” stuff – the broad strokes of our history and culture.\u00a0 I got to wonder – what’d be a good, entertaining crash course in “what is America” to someone who’d never been here before?<\/p>\n
And I thought; almost every culture in the world, from the poorest village in rural Pakistan to the eighties in Manhattan, has one form of communication in common; the movie.\u00a0 Even if you don’t speak a foreign language, you can often make out at least the broad outlines of what a movie is trying to say.<\/p>\n
So my question is this; if you had to pick five movies to explain America to someone from another country who had only the usual civics-class understanding of our nation and culture, what would they be?<\/p>\n
Leave comments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I work at a company that employs (like a lot of American companies these days) a very large number of south-Asian subcontractors.\u00a0 Most of them come from one rather large Indian vendor.\u00a0 And that vendor threw a little “Understanding India” session for us a few weeks back. It was interesting, of course; other cultures fascinate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8238","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-n-e","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8238"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8238\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8266,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8238\/revisions\/8266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}