Keya Choudhury is a Berlin-based intercultural trainer: She helps individuals and organisations prepare to work in different cultural environments than their own. Taking some time off from her current assignment in Bangalore, Keya recently came to Delhi for a short holiday. Being highly energetic and proactive, sight-seeing and meeting friends proved not fulfilling enough, so she enrolled in a week-long intensive Hindi course with Language Must. In this refreshingly lively interview, Keya shares some of her experiences learning Hindi, living in India and navigating different cultures.

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Hinduism, India's banyan tree of diverse religious traditions, reflects much of Indian people's behaviour, values and world views. With a growing interest in yoga and meditation in Western countries, Hinduism and its rituals have gained many followers outside India as well. Knowledge Must had the chance to interview a young German Hindu woman in her mid-twenties to find out about her experience, how she found her spiritual mentor and her understanding of Hinduism and India.

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Along with economic development and social evolution in both developed and developing countries, leisure activities have become more important and diverse than ever. Relaxing after long and strenuous working hours and the other obligations of daily life is now a necessity. The “need to escape” is enjoyed in different ways across cultures and is closely related to daily lifestyles, working life, and cultural patterns. As Chinese society has experienced great changes over the last few decades, leisure activities have also developed a lot. I have had the opportunity to observe these evolutions in China and explore Western and Chinese views on this issue. The following is an interview conducted with David Ritter, a 27 year old American male who has been living in China for two and a half years, and Yang Qi, a 25 year old Chinese male who studied in Australia for six years but has since returned to Chengdu. Below is a transcript of our discussions about Chinese leisure activities.

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If you were given a choice between your Passion and a Job that you don’t like much, what would you choose? Of course you will answer that you would love to carry on with your passion and not with a job that you are not interested in. But what if that job pays you good bucks but your passion doesn’t do any good to you in monetary terms? Many people would probably switch to the job leaving behind their passion because of societal pressure and conceived monetary concerns.

It is true that people expect you to take a good job just after you complete your graduation and that way society assumes you to be truly settled in your life. But this well-paying job might just become something for the next couple of years before you start feeling so bored and monotonous with doing something you are not interested in and then you realize that you are definitely not getting anywhere with your life – or at least not where you wanted to. If that is the case, then it might be really frustrating to deal with almost anything going on in your life. So what you need to do is find your passion and go for it rather than just going for any other bloody boring job.

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Lately Knowledge Must had the opportunity to interview the distinguished Swiss interculturalist Hans Durrer, author of articles and books, teacher and coach, theoretician as well as practitioner. His pioneering works on intercultural and visual communication offer a very innovative approach to the study of culture. One particular field of interest for him is photography. According to Durrer photographs are nothing else than shattered fragments of the broken mirror of reality, which force the viewer to reconstruct their meaning. Depending on the upbringing, interests, and also the mood of the viewer, the photographs’ meaning will be read very differently.

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I recently read an article in the New York Times entitled “In India, Castes, Honor and Killings Intertwine”. Over the six years or so since I made my first journey to India, I have recounted to friends and acquaintances at home some of the anecdotes (I wince to use this word – as if abuse of women should ever be relegated to a mere anecdote) I have encountered in first, second, or third person regarding the ways in which women are abused, maimed, or sometimes killed, as in the case of the young girl in the aforementioned article. I always want to defend or make excuses for the country that I love. It’s true, there hasn’t been a case of sati [immolation of widows on their husband’s funeral pyre] in years (though I hasten to point out, there has been in my lifetime), but I recall reading of daily “kitchen fires” in the police blotter in the Bangalore newspaper years ago; and discovering that this was a twisted and polite allusion to an intentional act of violence often resulting in homicide, not an indication that the country needed to examine safety standards of stovetop ranges.

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Kung fu (功夫, in Mandarin Chinese pronounced as gong fu), the popular term for Chinese martial arts, is a notion that conjures up mystical masters living in misty mountains and awe-inspiring artistic movements. Even in the rapidly modernising China of today one can find this cliché real and alive. One protector of this treasure trove of traditional Chinese culture is Master Li Quan (师傅李全). Born in Heilongjiang Province in the far north-eastern reaches of China, Master Li Quan has been a student and teacher of Chinese kung fu for more than 25 years.

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In the past few years, the immigration debate in France has become more and more impassioned. A new ministry name, “selective immigration”, plans for new laws, changes in the Nationality Code and debates about deportation are the media’s daily bread. However, in France, this debate can’t be separated from the particular experiences of the several previous waves of immigration (Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, African) and especially of the North African immigration. Arab people, Islam and French suburbs are nowadays unavoidable topics in the immigration debate.

And as usual, you will never hear of the positive aspects (e.g. cases of successful integration), only of the problems that fuel the debate and grab attention. Very recently, for example, the controversy regarding the ticket given to a French Arab woman driver wearing a burqa led to a new project to revise the Nationality Code to remove the French nationality of her husband (acquired by marriage) who is suspected of polygamy and social benefits fraud. The extreme-right parties happily jump on these kinds of stories to demand the strengthening of laws against immigration.

Let’s try to rebalance the debate... What is the reality of the North African immigrants and their ”heirs” (as the European Union sometimes refers to them) in France today?

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The information and news about Pakistan these days show us a dark picture of the country and there doesn’t seem to be too much reason to believe in the improvement of the country’s uncertain future. Our stereotypes about Pakistan, media images and public opinion often lead to false conclusions. To many observers politics in Pakistan seem more and more infiltrated by radical beliefs, religious fundamentalism, corruption, the military or authoritarian leadership.

Continue reading "The Vibrancy of Civil Society in Pakistan"