Pulse Legacy Archive January / February 2013 | Page 47

Learning to Do Business with a Global View
BY AVINASH CHANDARANA

W

hen I was five years
old, I found myself
thrown into a cauldron of change. It was

winter of 1972 when my family and I
landed in England, United Kingdom.
Along with thousands of Indian families, we had just become refugees,
having been ousted from Uganda, East

When it comes to identity, am I British or am I Indian?
Having been born in Africa, what sense of connection do I
have with my birthplace? When someone asks a surprisingly simple question about where I am from, a simple
“from the U.K.” just doesn’t feel right. So out comes the
standard response: “Well, I’m British but an Indian born in
Africa.” Often, I tag on “but I feel European” to reflect a
sense of belonging to a region and not to one particular
country. To further spice things up, I now live in Brussels,
Belgium with a Spanish wife and a four-year-old son (who
already speaks three languages).
The technical term for someone like me is “ThirdCulture Kid or TCK”—a person of one culture, born in
another and subsequently raised in a third country. And
now I live in a fourth. Such a global nomadic journey has
influenced my personal and professional perspectives on
how cultural differences permeate our everyday lives.

Africa by the dictatorial regime of
General Idi Amin Dada. We arrived to
the U.K. with a suitcase of clothes and
shattered dreams. To say we had to
rebuild our lives would be an understatement. And so began my first taste
of cultural divides, being raised in two
very distinct cultures—Indian and
British, a meeting of East and West.

Absorbing Cultures at an Early Age
Research tells us that, by the age of seven or so, we have
silently absorbed different values—or prioritized them
differently—from other cultures. The challenge is that we
acquire our own culture so early that we often don’t
realize we have it. And our behavior reflects this: what
we do and say sends out unintended messages to our
colleagues, acquaintances and neighbors. So while a
broad sparkling smile may create a positive climate for
business in the U.S., in Germany, it may be seen as a suspicious intrusion of privacy.
During my time living in the U.S., I observed how
children and students are generally taught to speak up for
themselves and assert their individuality. Could this be a
defining factor why they grow into confident adults who

January/February 2013

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PULSE 45