Welcome! Congrats on making it to my blog, and to the very first post of it, no less! Much like my Indian employment visa, it’s coming into existence later than expected and with no shortage of bumps and potholes along the way… but this time around, it was thankfully caused simply by my own time management than by an actively unhelpful bureaucracy.
I originally liked “Stranger in a Strange Land” as a working title, but of course, that ran into some issues with intellectual property and whatnot. More importantly, calling out a particular land as “strange” seems to saddle too much responsibility on the land itself. Every land is strange, and calling one out as stranger than any other is a completely observer-dependent call — India may seem strange to me, but the US undoubtedly seems just as strange1 to someone born and raised in India. And as a physicist-at-heart, i strive to make observer-dependence either blatantly obvious or entirely nonexistent whenever possible. Hence, i chose a title that satisfies the former: this part of the world is completely new to me. And as i spend time getting to know my new home, i’ll simultaneously learn to fully appreciate the new culture, new foods, new people, and (of course) new brand of strangeness.
Sidebar: this is all probably far more unsolicited-insight-into-Dan’s-thought-process and far less stories-from-India than you were looking for, but rest assured we’ll dive right into the stories once i get all this introductory stuff out of the way. And even if that balance never reaches a fully satisfactory level… well, it is my blog.
Disclaimer: i know that a lot of what i write in this blog will inevitably end up being some degree of cringey and/or naïve — such is the nature of moving to a country that i have very limited prior familiarity with. Self-awareness can’t completely mitigate that unfortunate cringe factor, but it’ll hopefully at least dull the wince when i look back at early entries and am forced to confront my early ignorances. To those of you with more experience than me in this domain: you can treat reading this blog as an exercise in cultivating patience 🙏
Second disclaimer: i will try to use my authentic voice as much as possible (and self-censor as little as possible) when writing these entries, so that i can focus on the content itself and not get caught up in worrying about how i phrase it (i.e. it’s much less time-consuming to just write the words that come to mind and not spend ages reshaping them into something more PG). What i’m trying to say is, these posts may contain naughty words, and if the presence of those offends you, please message me directly and i can tell you how things are going in a writing voice more tailored to our specific relationship. And that’s a genuine offer — i would hate for a family member’s keeping-tabs-on-Dan quest to be derailed by an errant f*ck (which will not be asterisked in the future, btw).
Third disclaimer: my authentic voice sometimes gets torn between American and British English, since i typically use one or the other in direct conversations depending on which language the other person uses. Hence, i’ll sometimes clunk up my writing with some manner of using both terms in parallel, akin to the technique used by Lynne Murphy in her fantastic blog, Separated by a Common Language. Hope you’re ready to learn, ya frickin nerds! 🖕🏼😜🖕🏼
Fourth disclaimer: yes, i frequently use emojis for punctuation/emphasis/tone. No, i do not plan on stopping anytime soon. Yes, this will probably be one of the things i look back on in ten years and cringe all the way down to my bone marrow. And yes, i am choosing instead to believe that the arc of language itself will bend toward my beloved picture-infused textuality, leading me to feverishly wave a giant sassy-emoji2 flag from the highest structure i can find while bellowing “VINDICATION!” until i’m blue in the face.3
Fifth disclaimer: yes, i know that the first-person singular pronoun “i” is supposed to be capitalised in written English. I just don’t like it that way, and since this is my blog, i make the rules.
Not really a disclaimer, more of a technical note: i adore footnotes and will use them regularly; you can just hover over the superscript with your cursor to see whatever cheeky4 addendum i’ve decided to tack on to an already-exhausting sentence. Mobile users… i’m not really sure how viewing footnotes works for you. Really just hoping that it somehow does 🤞🏼
That’s all the housekeeping i can think of for now! I’m currently most of the way done with my first Actual Post About India5, so keep watching this space — you’ll be neck-deep in India anecdotes before you can say “i thought i ordered the non-spicy chicken biryani??”
Talk soon ✌😘
Stranger in a New Land 