ABCD

2009-03-15T01:47:00.000-07:00

When I was five I was referred to as an American by a group of Indian girls at my school and they definitely were not giving me a compliment. When I was eight while I walked home from school I would sometimes have to deal with white high school boys calling me Hindu. When I was in my early twenties I had a conversation about the term ABCD with a friend who was raised in India and was surprised to learn that she couldn’t understand why I found the term insulting. It seems that people are always telling me what I am or annoyingly assuming that as an American born child of Indian parents I must be confused about my identity. This will never change. If someone sees me watching an Indian movie then I’m Indian and if someone finds out that I can’t speak Punjabi fluently then I’m an American. I actually don’t mind when people do this. To be honest I’ve done it myself so can’t complain. But the confusion thing never made any sense to me. I know it stems from being raised in a country whose culture is different from the one I was raised in by my family so naturally people who were not brought up this way would assume confusion is the automatic outcome. I’ve just never seen this. I live in a small town that has a large Indian population and so grew up with a lot of Indians being raised just like me and I have to say confusion isn’t what I saw or see today. Maybe it’s the luxury of living with so many other Indians and if I grew in an area where I was truly the minority then my outlook would be different. As it stands though, the ones who seem to see the confusion the most are the ones who were raised in India. I’ve also noticed that it seems to come up mostly when someone raised here lives their life more like an American then in the traditional Indian way. They seem to forget that we are in fact Americans who just happen to have parents from India. Funny that this doesn’t really work the other way. No American I know of would say I was confused if I decided to live my life in the traditional Indian way. Now every kid of Indian parents has at one point or another become frustrated with the Indian culture and wished they could live more like their fellow Americans but this too me isn’t confusion. It’s just frustration and don’t tell me that Indians in India don’t sometimes get frustrated as well. What do you all think? Is my outlook not quite right because of where I live? Would living in an area with very few Indians make a difference? Are we all confused as they show in the movies and the books (Which interestingly are mostly created by Indians raised in India.)?

Cultured Desi

ABCD