Hola from Miami

After a 4 month stint in Mumbai, I moved to Miami earlier this month. Miami is well...different from the rest of the USA. It does not even feel like you are in the States. It has been a huge shock for me. After having lived for nearly 14 years in the USA and having moved and traveled a bit all I can say is..this is different.

For starters, you hardly hear any English spoken. You walk into a gym and there are people talking in Spanish and TVs tuned to various Spanish channels. So I guess there is no debate about the debate on whether America should should adopt English as the national language. I can see this being a thorny issue in the near future. In India, most people are multi-lingual. Most of my friends could speak at least in 3 languages: English, their mother tongue (Tamil in my case) and Hindi, supposedly India's national language. Hindi was deemed the national language as maybe 40% of the people speak Hindi. This also means 60% do not speak Hindi but have it forced on them. In Tamilnadu there are anti-Hindi riots which typically involve blacking out Hindi signs in Railway Stations, damaging public property and a few deaths to defend the honor of Tamil. There is this thought in India that the nation is fragmented because there is no single national language like say the USA or UK.

Another first I encountered in Miami was the other day when I was watching the local news. As the news was coming to a close there was this ticker with important information, about where the main anchor got her dress and who did the hair for the weather person. Umm which spa in Coconut Grove does Melanie Mendez go to...oh another suicide bombing in Iraq, wait a minute where did Daisy Diaz get that pretty dress...umm gas 5 bucks a gallon...darn forgot where in SoBe Shelly Sanchez gets her hair done...

Guess I must be in Miami..