The Namesake Post A # 1

One cultural difference between the modern lives of American's and the life of the Ganguli family is the difference in which the woman of the house regards the man. In United States pop culture, television, and literature, to put it bluntly, sex is shameless. It is portrayed as a completely okay activity for most ages to engage in. In Indian films, kissing or touching is an example of something that almost never happens. I watched a film earlier this year called Ashoke, and it followed that criteria perfectly. He basically meets his dream wife, and there are probably about five scenes where they could kiss, but they don't. So I guess that Indian films are much more conservative than American films in that sense.
In addition to that, the wife Ashima tells the reader how she never addresses her husband by his name "Ashoke." "She has adopted his surname but refuses, for propriety's sake, to utter his first. It's not the type of thing Bengali wives do. Like a kiss or caress in a Hindi movie, a husband's name is something intimate and unspoken, cleverly patched over. [...] She utters [...] to replace it, which roughly translates roughly as 'Are you listening to me (2)?'" In the U.S., husbands have many nicknames such as "honey" or something stupid like that, while in the Ganguli family, Ashoke is sometimes addressed as "Are you listening."