They think I am…

I was born in Mysore in Karnataka, and consider myself to be a Kannadiga. The elders in the family say that we migrated from the area that we can call Andhra now. So, while we speak Kannada at home, we are also capable of speaking in Telugu, not the Andhra style, but the one that is popular in Karnataka.

I look like in my profile photograph, I had more hair on my head many years ago, and my skin color is dark-wheat.

I stay in Bangalore, one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world if you just count the number of languages that are spoken here.

Here’s what I have noticed in my conversations with people.

Tamilians think that I am one of them (in Bangalore) if I have to get into a conversation with one of them, even if the other party knows Kannada well, I am spoken to in Tamil, maybe the way I look. My name also gets changed to Giridharan :-).

It’s not restricted to Tamilians, I was in Kerala with my friends, mostly from Karnataka. While others were spoken to in Hindi or English, with me it was in Malayalam.

When we go out with family for eating out, I am the designated driver. The protocol if it’s a hotel, I drop the family closest to the hotel door and then try to find parking if there is no valet. More often than not, I am mistaken to be the “driver” employed by the family. I am instructed to park the car in some place and I can wait with other drivers. Since it happened many times, I thought maybe I should dress in better clothes. But to no avail, it may be the way I look.

When I do out for meetings with my team members who are fairly well built, in most first-time meetings, I am assumed to not be the CEO and one of the others is. I am quite lean, probably underweight too. A CEO is expected to be one well-built person leading the charge. Well, I am who I am.

Probably, this one takes the cake. I was in Vancouver to attend a Microsoft conference. I booked an Uber to take me to my Airbnb from the airport. The driver was a black Canadian. I don’t know what he saw in me. The minute I came with my baggage to his car, he felt a lot of brotherly love towards me. The driver was from Ethiopia and he felt that I was from there too. I resembled one of his relatives. He was just soo happy seeing me.

I am just fortunate to think so many people think that I am their own :-).