Okay to our definition of culture, culture is the glasses through which we see life. If I wear red tinted sunglasses, everything around me is going to look red. We see life through our cultural perspectives. Culture is acquired understanding and values through which we know how to behave and interpret human interaction and life's experiences. Acquired, we're not born with culture, we learn it from the time we were born. It determines our understanding of a situation and the values from which we act.
It tells us how to behave in any given situation, and perhaps more significantly, it tells us how to interpret others actions. A young it worker had been working in the US and moved back to India. While visiting his family in small town, India, he was taking a morning walk. He passed by a young lady and smiled at her and said hi. The word get back to his father that he had acted inappropriately. A behavior that was considered friendly in the US was taken differently in rural India.
Actions and interpretation of actions are dependent upon our cultures. Culture is knowledge, beliefs, and behavior are shared by a group of people. And finally, culture is handed down from generation to generation. It's absorbed by interacting with people, and it's influenced by media. Culture is handed down from generation to generation Sometimes surprised to see actions and behaviors which are echoed in a grandson of a grandfather. I grew up in small town, Pennsylvania.
My grandfather did not like one of the American baseball teams called the New York Yankees. As a result of that, I grew up hating the New York Yankees now became a bit of a problem for me when I moved to New York. But those attitudes, those things which came from my grandfather, impact me even to this day, and I have a hard time rooting for New York's favorite team. Culture is absorbed. When we are in the US having a conversation around the table with our kids. They'll sometimes say that you said that the Indian way.
Now, we've been in India for 13 years. And over the years we have simply absorb much of Indian culture, not intentionally, but certainly it has impacted us. And when you go to the United States as well, you'll be various aspects of American culture that subtly you will take on. Culture is also impacted by media. Our first visit to India was in 1989. In those days, there were basically two TV stations, both the Russia and I remember in those days, in some homes that had a TV, we would wait each evening to listen to the evening news, the English news a half hour long.
Five years later, I came back to India and I was sitting in a hotel room in Hyderabad, watching the American TV star being chased by the police that a highway Because of the crime that he had committed, in five short years, India moved from two TV stations, to all kinds of cable that gave him a view of the world. Bollywood has had a huge impact on you, as I expect Hollywood has had on me. And media has a way of changing our view of the world in which we live and in the world around us. It both reflects our world and also impacts our world. I think it's important that we are aware of media. And sometimes the messages that media sends are perhaps not the reality, either India or the US.
We are all part of a culture. And when we move to another culture, it's important that we learn then to navigate those differences.