India

I am going to India from August 1 - 22 with my parents and brother, Neil. We haven't traveled together to India since 2002, and so I'm especially excited that this trip will be shared as a nearly complete family (Neetu will be greatly missed). I felt an especially deep calling to India this year, and I don't know why. I think being in Germany and therefore away from my two homelands has made me reflect even more on my identity and what it consists of. It's easy to hop from Indian to American culture and back and not even have to think about it...when I'm in India or America, that is. Germany is a bit different. I now live in a neutral third party where I can't cling to former identities. I had a hard time with this at first, but after thinking about it and sorting things out with Neetu (my brilliant sister whose main research deals with cultural/immigrant identity issues), I realized that 1). I don't have to define myself based on anyone else's definitions or expectations (aka "you speak broken Hindi and therefore you aren't Indian" - I say BS to that, and won't prescribe to what someone tells me about who I am) and 2). being Indian-American and therefore having a 'mixed idenitity' is beautiful for just that reason - it's not the former or the latter, but rather something that can be defined based on what values one chooses to preserve from both cultures. For example, my cousin in Germany is raising Ahren, my nephew, to speak Marwari and Marathi fluently. At the age of 4, he has a wonderful command of Marwari. Contras this with my Indian tongue, which is somewhat functional but is more or less a mess of three different languages awkwardly strung together. It's something that I will sort out via Hindi classes once I move back to the States, or rather, once my German is fluent enough to my liking. Didi, however, allows Ahren to eat meat, something that our Marwari culture does not support. I personally do not desire to ever eat meat nor will I raise children who do. The question here is not over who is wrong or right, but rather, which values we've both chosen to uphold. It's all relative from person to person, family to family. Being someone who is very interested in languages and cultures in the world at large, I'm sure that I'll always have identity issues. And in the end, they're good for us - they build character. Understanding comes, however, when I realize that I am who I am and that's all that matters.