An Aberration

The most incredible litany of events unfolded over the lunch table today. For the 1st time since my arrival in Germany, I shared food with a German. Not just that, in fact I ate from someone else's plate. It might not be an incident worth mentioning for us Indians, but if you have read my previous blogs you will realise that this unprecedented occurence does call for a post at the very least.

To elaborate, a new female student joined our laboratory at IMTEK yesterday. Actually now she is the sole representative of the fairer sex in our hitherto all-guy department. Apparently German Engineering universities suffer from the same fate as the IITs but more about that later. Back to the point. So, I was having lunch with my lab group. All of us had wiped our dishes clean while this new entrant had left half the salad that she had taken, in her plate. I was startled when Daniel, a phd student in my lab, offered to finish the left-overs from her plate. He later even offered me to help him in his task and together we cleaned up all the remnants of carrots and peas. Then, he even gave a - turn back if a black cat crosses your path - type of explanation for his extra-ordinary act. Purportedly, they believed that if food was left in the plate, inclement weather followed the next day and so he was finishing the salad to prevent this bad omen. For once, I was exposed to the superstitious side of the normally pragmatic Germans :)

I have a nice anecdote to illustrate the similarity between the gender inequalities in German universities and IITs. A few weeks back, I found about 10-12 young girls going in and out of the 3 labs in my department. Quite surprised at seeing alien faces in the department, I posed my query to Andreas, my professor(I quite like this way of addressing your prof by his name). His reply was "We here in Germany are facing the problem of not enough girls opting for engineering, physics and chemical branches. So these school seniors have been brought here to aquaint them with technical fields." When I followed this up with figures from my batch in IIT Bombay, it brought a wide grin to his face.

P.S. - This is not the last you will hear from me about the 'not sharing food' habit of Germans. I have dissected the pros n cons of it in great depth and there's more to follow