Under the Lens

It's funny, and perhaps a bit scary, how quickly we can turn on ourselves. "Ourselves," here, is a specific word, not to indicate the Self of each person in question, but rather the collective Selves of whichever group to which we may belong. However, being only 22 years old, and having a limited number of group inclusions on which to draw, in this case "ourselves" refers to the Indian community in which I have been raised, and within that my family.

The cliché, but true, first sentence is that my parents came to this country for education and a better life. A similarly American-dream type second sentence is that this was motivated partially by their own desires but also by the idea of their then unborn children. And so I was educated at Berkeley, and along the way I have inevitably become an American, of sorts.

While at Berkeley, I engaged in the typical self-exploration of most South Asians - classes in Hindu Mythology and South Asian Religion, taking Tamil in attempt to better communicate with my relatives, and a brief (and hilarious) participation in Indus via culture show. I never thought of this as rebellious or self-deprecating behavior; in fact, most people consider this quite the opposite.

But you lose something when you look at your roots through a scholarly lens. When I was younger, my self-awareness in relation to my culture was personal and intuitive, albeit perhaps ill-defined. (Having grown up in white neighborhoods until college, the seas of brown faces at the Madras airport was quite unsettling to me when I was younger.) During college, I took the classes and gained the vocabulary to speak about India and dissect what it might mean to me. I increased my knowledge, certainly, and gained a heightened awareness to what is Indian, what is Indian American, what is a result of colonial oppression. I am no longer able to simply believe what I or my parents might think. There is always now the muddlement of a frozen Asia or the traditional versus modern role of the Indian female or the British imposition of Victorian propriety that gets in the way.

Then again, maybe it's just a matter of thinking. Maybe Berkeley did teach me to question - who, why, what I am - and maybe this is hardly a matter of diaspora and more just a matter of being young and figuring out what I believe. It's a frightening thing to justify oneself in a world where there are already so many guidelines in place.