The first simple lesson taught to budding professionals in cross-cultural management is to accept and agree that each culture is different and there should not be any attempt to homogenize them. Trouble starts when one culture starts imposing its traditions on the other culture and thats what is happening in India right now.

Live and Let Live!!!

Discomfort toward constructive ends is necessary. If I never learned math or English, would I be able to earn a decent living? If I wasn’t forced to help with my parents’ business as a child, would I be a manager at age 22? If people never went to school or summer camp, would they grow and learn? Doing chores is uncomfortable. Being a member of society can be uncomfortable. Integrating into a new culture can be uncomfortable. Our fathers told us that dealing with this discomfort built our character and made us more mature, but we didn’t listen to them, and so we avoid discomfort all the time, to our own and to the world’s detriment.

I advocate discomfort. Sell your car and ride the train. Talk with homeless people and volunteer for women’s shelters. Visit a foreign country for a month or two and realize that although a foreign cultural system may not agree with ours, it is the system’s integrity that matters, not the system itself. We must find a way to integrate with foreign cultures or risk alienating our worldly neighbors. We can’t ask other cultures to integrate with us– this is a personal task and responsibility. Ideally we are able to integrate without fully abandoning our own culture or diluting either culture to irrelevance. These are uncomfortable tasks but necessary for our maturity and usefulness as human adults, in this new interconnected world where an American has the privilege and honor of commenting in an Indian publication.