Skip to main content

Uses Of Pop Culture

You understand the uses of popular culture when they decide to name a server Bamm-Bamm instead of lets say Macavity. I would have never got the Flintstones reference but the T.S. Elliot allusion would have made me smile.

So much better if there was another person in the room who also remembered the mystery cat. It makes for a small but meaningful moment of coworker bonding. It takes the edge off a serious discussion around the degrading performance stats of a production server that has been getting the boss undesirable attention from his management.

Cultural reference points change by place and time. You become aware of the flow of both relative to you when you do not understand references to popular icons. You lean on others to help you navigate a varied landscape of pop-culture, understand key landmarks and their significance. When all else fails there is Google and Wikipedia. I think both generation and culture gap will become things of the past at least in terms of awareness. As long as you are connected, you can get caught up.

All you miss is the 15 seconds of impromptu camaraderie when the tech guy says "The jobs on Bamm-Bamm failed three times this week" and everyone else chuckles thinking "Flintstones" instead of making a note to pitch getting Bamm-Bamm decommissioned.

Comments

Prerona said…
you are right. some time down the line these, and perhaps many other, differences will die down and out. and the whole world will become one homogenous glob fed on mtv and the internet

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...