In my previous post, I wrote about the various ways in which DESIs try to come to terms with an alien culture and in trying to reconcile ourselves with the cultural and social values that we bring in with us, we are often at loss to explain our identity. This confusion is exacerbated by our own inability to be flexible, to recognize that even though we come from a rich cultural heritage, our newly adopted country has something exciting and important to offer as well. We try to use the compass that was calibrated in India to find directions in the US without making an attempt to recalibrate it. As most of us are highly educated and hard working, we usually manage to be at least modestly well off and we take that as a sign that all is well – that we have been successful in creating a perfect amalgamation of the two cultures.
There is a jolt of reality however, when kids are born to DESIs in the US and the struggle to save our kids from getting Americanized begins. I got the first taste of the collateral damage of this obsession when I watched Spellbound – the namesake documentary on the competition. I was shocked to realize that in pursuit of the desire for academic excellence of their children – these parents had ruined two to three years of the lives of their kids in forcing them to mug reams and reams of dictionary.
I got some first hand experience sometime later when I met a first generation Indian family at a wedding where their ten year old son was the star of the evening, belting out one classic Hindi number after other. The glow on the face of the parents was however not matched by the smile on the kid’s face. With his mother sitting right behind him all through the evening, he looked under a lot of pressure. I later discovered that the parents had an obsession with making sure that their children do not “forget” Indian culture. Since they lived in the middle of nowhere in a small town, they drove their son about 200 miles every weekend each way, to have him learn Indian singing from a teacher. The kid did not even know to read some of the more difficult words used in Hindi songs so his mother had written lyrics of all the songs using the English alphabet. “Bend It Like Beckham” (I don’t deny that being a movie it had its necessary melodrama) was again woven around essentially the same idea – that of the first generation Indian Immigrants who, even after many years in the new country, are not able to come to terms with the cultural paradigm shift that has happened around them.
But is this inability to come to terms with an alien culture, the only reason for this attempt by DESIS trying their best to ensure that their kids trod the same linear path in career and culture that they themselves have followed? I feel that it also involves a guilt factor that emanates from the realization that perhaps we left our culture, our traditions and our country for mere material comforts. During the earlier years, when the race is on to buy a two garage family house, to take vacations in the most exotic locations – this feeling is shut out in some corner. But when children come, when we are getting a little ahead in the years, when we realize that probably our children will be our most enduring legacy we get into panic mode. What if they marry a non-Indian? What if they get into some weird American career? What if they don’t relate to their religion? As Jhumpa Lahiri writes in her Newsweek article this week and I quote:
According to my parents I was not American, nor would I ever be no matter how hard I tried. I felt doomed by their pronouncement, misunderstood and gradually defiant. In spite of the first lessons of arithmetic, one plus one did not equal two but zero, my conflicting selves always canceling each other out.
The sense of alienation and confusion that she felt as growing up because of the alienation and confusion of her parents is tragic because it was not her fault that her parents still felt that Calcutta was still their home. That she later turned out to more than alright and now deeply cherishes her Indian roots is irrelevant to this discussion because there are many others who grow up with this sense of lack of roots and it becomes a part of them just because their parents could not come to terms with a decision they themselves made many years ago.
It does not need to be that way – there is a lot that this country can teach to even someone from a 5000 year old culture only if we are willing to, there are a lot more respectable careers beyond being an engineer, a doctor or an MBA and your kid getting married to a non-Indian is not the end of this world.
Oh! and a helpful tip - keep those clothes closets tightly shut specially while cooking; everyone does not need to know what you ate last night :)