Sweden mein aapka swagat hai.

   This is my first article on this blog, and I feel obliged to give you a short intro about myself, about where I am, about what I do...basically share everything about me short of adding you on facebook. My (full) name is Ramasubramanian Sivasankar..but some of my phonetically challenged friends call me Shiv and the rest call me Rama (not because these guys cannot pronounce the full name...but because they forget why they called out my name by the time they finish enunciating it).

    As is easily discernible (for Indians) I am a South-Indian and both my parents are from Tamil Nadu, but as fate would have it...my dad had had enough of dosas and idlis and moved to Kolkata (West Bengal, go KKR!!) after hearing stories about how different pani-puris were in Kolkata and how one could buy a rossogulla for a anna (4 pice). My mother joined him later only to find that rossogullas had become 2 annas (8 pice) per piece but the never changing prices of puchkas (that's pani puri in Kolkata) made her fall in love with Kolkata.

   I arrived on the scene soon after, but to my parent's horror I liked gulab jamuns better than rossogullas and bhel puri more than puchkas. They decided I would not go far in life with such radical thoughts and I would never have consanguinity with Bengal or Bengalis(how wrong they were). I attended St.James' School and had a ball throughout my 14 years of pre-university education. I was not noted for any extraordinary achievement in sports (except in 1st grade where I held up Sports Day by finishing last in a race where the boy who came in second last finished 15 minutes before me), I never came first in class...but then again never came last either. I was more or less average... But by some fluke (my family calls it the Lord's blessings), I did well in my only two public exams (10th {ICSE} and 12th {ISC} )...followed by a lot of entrance exams, which I breezed through because nearly all of them were MCQs and all it required was more luck (or more blessings from the Lord). After going to IIT for admission counselling (took a whopping 7 hours)..I decided I wanted to go somewhere with less red tape, more freedom, more excitement....instead I went to Singapore to get a degree in Computer Science from the National University of Singapore.

  It seemed initially I had some talent as a coder, but almost immediately I decided I must shake things up a bit...I decided I wanted to go overseas......again. So along came a scholarship program (NOC) to go to Stockholm for a year...hell yeah!! 

Since then, I have settled down into my job at hi-tech startup (MoSync AB, www.mosync.com) and grown up..altogether become more of a man and less of a boy.....

NOT!! 

  So much for my intro, now lets get on with the article at hand. As I had previously indicated, I am currently walking around the streets of Stockholm (often getting lost)..and have been for the last 7 months. I remember the frantic days before I left for Stockholm, I googled day and night to try and find out as much as I could about Sweden. Everything in my research indicated to only one thing....there were going to be a lot of changes...a lot

  You see, I am a TamBrahm (which is rude slang for Tamil Brahmin...), as a caste we are vegetarians, non-alcoholics (cough, cough) and rather meek. Sweden is famous for a lot of things : hot women, IKEA, hot women, H&M, hot women, Saab, hot women.... and somewhere on the list is meatballs (beef!! HOLY COW!!) and the weekly if not daily consumption of lethal amounts of alcohol....and hot women.

  My family was sure I am going to go down the dark path. But alas, given the situation of the weak world economy...future career opportunities outweighed the risks.

  The first few days in Sweden were just nerve wrecking. I was scared to do anything or go anywhere...but time eased my nerves. Took me a month but I settled into a rhythm at work as well...soon I was one of the guys (which wasn't too hard..considering we still do not have any female employees..)!!

  The point of my articles this month is to give voice to some of my personal observations. Some as accurate as Lasith Malinga's yorkers and some as random as erm...Ravi Shashtri's comments on Lasith Malinga's yorkers.

  Swedes vs Indians....

 I know what you just said in your head, "he is going to list the zillion differences between Sweden and India"...I would disagree 

a) zillion is not a number 

b) I am more interested in similarities.

 There are hundreds of observations that I have made, but I do not think I will list them all. Just the major ones...the fundamental ones.

For today's entry,

Lagom : Quoting wikipedia, "In a single word, lagom is said to describe the basis of the Swedish national psyche, one of consensus and equality. In recent times Sweden has developed greater tolerance for risk and failure as a result of severe recession in the early 1990s. Nonetheless, it is still widely considered ideal to be modest and avoid extremes."

This philosophy is so understated and yet such an integral part of Sweden and Swedish culture. Yet somehow I feel that somewhere this is an intrinsic part of Indian culture as well. I mean how many times have you heard someone say in India, "why buy the new one when the old one is fine"...trust me the average Swede says the same thing!! 


Indians all around the world now have a comeback line when someone calls us cheap...we aren't cheap, we just like to be..lagom

I mean I am sure you must have heard about the bald chap under the peepal tree, who declared to the world the wisdom in choosing the middle path. Yes, Gautam Buddha..the world's first hippie !! Lagom is clearly as Indian as it is Swedish.

So from the country famous for having fostered the hippie culture onto the world stage to the country which started it....PEACE OUT. 

-Shiv