A more sensible interpretation is that marriage and courtship rituals ("courtship" extended to include "casual" relationships) have a heavy culture specific component to them.
I had a Canadian manager (tall handsome intelligent guy) who tried applying his knowledge of how "dating" worked when he was posted to Bangalore for a year and "struck out" all the time until one day, at a party, he got drunk and asked me "Dude, how the [expletive] do you get laid hereabouts? I've been trying to get a date for 6 months and every girl says "No Thanks". I am going crazy! ".
So I gave him a 20 minute crash lecture in how these things worked in India (and specifically Urban India) and the appropriate moves and counter moves and what they mean and how to interpret and act on them. Needless to say these "rules" are very different from the Western "dating". To his credit he picked up the 'rules of the game' very fast and soon managed to get what he wanted.
When any bunch of people get dumped into a new culture, it is fair to expect that a few of them never quite pick up these nuances. Whether that is worth an article in the wsj is a different matter ;-). I could conclude (if had never been in a Western country) "These Canadians strike out all the time hyuk hyuk",and it might even make a popular article in the local paper, but then I'd still be the idiot.
To summarize, the Indian "dating game" has very different rules, and they don't work in the USA (and vice versa). For Hackers an analogy that works is submitting perfectly valid Haskell code to the javac compiler ;-)
Due Disclosure: I am Indian, have lived in the USA and had no problems "decoding" how courtship, sex and marriage worked there.
That may be true, but the article was about Indian families becoming reluctant to marry their daughters of to Indian expats living in the USA. I don't think there was any intention by the author ("Shefali Anand") to "hyuk hyuk" at Indians.
heh! You are completely right. I was reacting to an article i read on the web a few days ago (damned if I can find it now) about how Indian men do poorly in the dating game in the United States. I saw the title of the submission and connected the two. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I was coding all night and am a little zonked.
(It is the middle of the afternoon here and I've gone almost 38 hours without sleep.)
One of my (Indian) friends just got engaged to an American (Caucasian) woman and we had discussed some of this over the phone a few days ago. Must have been on my mind I guess.
In any case you are right. My comment doesn't have much to do with the article.
When I have the time I'll probably write it up as a blog post (or a series of posts! 20 minutes of conversation is a lot of writing!) and submit the link here.
I would too be very happy to hear a little about the indian dating game, particularly how it works in the bigger metropolises.
I've spent a bit of time in Kochi, Kerela, in the southwest, and while I spent most of my time working on our business, I couldn't help but notice how incredibly beautiful yet amazingly shy many girls were. We did hear a lot of rumors of decadent partying and dating going on, and had indian friends who seemed to hang out with different girls, but we failed miserably at locating these sweet spots.
Can't help but imagining that even indian youth needs to let of some steam sometimes and just party their asses off.
I had a Canadian manager (tall handsome intelligent guy) who tried applying his knowledge of how "dating" worked when he was posted to Bangalore for a year and "struck out" all the time until one day, at a party, he got drunk and asked me "Dude, how the [expletive] do you get laid hereabouts? I've been trying to get a date for 6 months and every girl says "No Thanks". I am going crazy! ".
So I gave him a 20 minute crash lecture in how these things worked in India (and specifically Urban India) and the appropriate moves and counter moves and what they mean and how to interpret and act on them. Needless to say these "rules" are very different from the Western "dating". To his credit he picked up the 'rules of the game' very fast and soon managed to get what he wanted.
When any bunch of people get dumped into a new culture, it is fair to expect that a few of them never quite pick up these nuances. Whether that is worth an article in the wsj is a different matter ;-). I could conclude (if had never been in a Western country) "These Canadians strike out all the time hyuk hyuk",and it might even make a popular article in the local paper, but then I'd still be the idiot.
To summarize, the Indian "dating game" has very different rules, and they don't work in the USA (and vice versa). For Hackers an analogy that works is submitting perfectly valid Haskell code to the javac compiler ;-)
Due Disclosure: I am Indian, have lived in the USA and had no problems "decoding" how courtship, sex and marriage worked there.