What my friends from AP taught me.

"Do you know that feeling when you get a gift that you really needed, but you just did not know you needed it." That is how I think about the good times that I spent with my friends from Hyderabad.

I suppose I will never truly know what they think about the first world and U.S. culture specifically, but what I did realize is that coming from a different culture affords them different overall strengths and weaknesses. Please understand all individuals are extremely complex, and cultures are not even knowable when you have been raised in them, but if we use a broad enough brush, we should be able to paint some generalizations. 

So without future introspection we will get to "What I learned from my Friends from Andhra Pradesh."

Emotional control is important, it is a skill that you need to work on. 

So I joined an almost exclusively indian team, almost all coming from A.P. Soon on, I realized that they had much better control over when they wanted to go to argue and go on the warpath. I would run around creating chaos, and they would shake their heads and say "No Gareth" in the nicest of ways. After a couple of episodes of this, I started to feel like a clod. It took some time, and also backing down to one or two cups of coffee, but I got to the point that just because I was feeling badly did not mean that I would make a emotional mess for everyone.

 Being a good person is important, it is something you need to refine and work on.

You need to endeavor to be a good person. You need to continue to work at it. Oddly enough, the overall definition of what a good person does seems to be remarkably similar. Dutiful, honest, giving, not greedy, concerned for the welfare of others, yup, really I never found anything different in our definitions. What I did notice is the fact that my friends from AP meant it, they were not just saying, they were trying to work at it. Not always succeeding mind you, but they would like to change the world for the better with their actions. This is never too far away from their conversations. You really can't go a whole day without someone in the group pointing out how someones actions are selfless and for everyones good. Which brings us to the next point...

Working in a group involves skills and communication, you should get better at this.  

When working in the group, you need to point out successful things that people in the group are doing and praises them. Praising and teasing are strong team building activities. 

So it might not be much of a cultural exchange.  I do value the ten odd words of Telegu that I know know, and the three written words I can scratch out. I know more about the geography and the history of the different cultures and languages there. All in all an amazing experience for me.