To all my Indian friends who feel detached from their own culture for whatever reason and feel isolated and unacknowledged as Indian:
I don't care that you haven't watched as many Bollywood movies as your peers.
I don't care that you never learned to speak or very poorly speak the language your parents spoke.
I don't care that you never crushed on Indian performers, actors, or singers no matter how amazing their content may be.
I don't care that you've never been able to relate to the Indian memes your Indian peers repost and bond over.
I don't care that you've never had any solid Indian friends because you just never had that much in common with each other.
I could go on and on but the point is...
I don't care how Indian you perceive yourself to be.
You have the choice to reconnect with your culture obviously. But that choice is solely up to you.
And regardless of whether you make that choice... remember that you are Desi enough.
Because no one can take away your culture, your identity, and the experiences that make you who you are.
223 notes. Wow. I'm honestly very humbled by how much traction this got.
For context, I am an Indian neurodivergent enby born and raised in the United States who's nearly out of their undergrad schooling.
When I was typing up this post, I'd just seen an account on Instagram whose goal was to be a hub for brown people - a place for them to feel at home, to be that one little account on the Internet to be their support and crutch amongst the sea of users who simply did not share the same worldview as they did and even looked down on the Indian worldview for not living up to their Westernized standards.
As I looked through the account, I was reminded of how pretentious and unapproachable I thought the other Indian girls/women that I knew from my previous years to be, and I remembered why I just couldn't relate to them and be friends with them (despite my desire and my parents' desire for me to do so). During times when I feel invalidated and when I feel left out, I usually turn to jot out my thoughts to share with other people - an unhealthy coping mechanism given that you should never depend on others to give you satisfaction, but a coping mechanism nonetheless. That's honestly what fuelled me to write out this post - to remind myself that no matter how exposed I was or how much I related to my Indian heritage, I was just as Indian as the women I so resented for being pretentious about how much they embraced their Indian-ness.
(To be clear though, this post did not come out of a feeling of hate, but a feeling of wanting to be accepted and appreciated by others.)
But as I looked further into that account, I started to understand their feelings and my heritage a bit more, and become more connected to my Desi roots. And as I continued to perceive the events happening in the small world around me, I began to see how my Indian-ness meshed in with my queerness and neurodivergence. At long last, I started to accept myself for who I was, and not for the person I wanted to be that wasn't truly me.
For example, about a year ago I identified as androgyne because I hated the feminine ideals my mother forced on me as a child, and a lot of those ideals I perceived were not only through participating in Indian and Hindu events but were also rooted in Desi ideals of feminine beauty and being "on the top" of everyone else. I thus turned to Westernized beauty ideals (specifically, androgyny) to try to satiate the parts of me that simply weren't feminine and didn't resonate in the slightest with womanhood. This resulted in a massive conflict between my parents and myself where hair was cut, threats were exchanged, and many tears were shed. As this conflict grew, I resented wearing my beloved Kurtis and chudidhars, my Indian jewelry (including my bhaitale battus which I once dearly cherished), and even just seeing myself in the Bharatanatyam outfits that I once felt so powerful wearing.
None of this really subsided until I took this recent summer off at my college and away from my parents to focus on my research and myself. And when I came back ten weeks later, I found myself craving the Indian dishes I once hated from eating them every single day and loving wearing even the most feminine of Indian dresses. I also found that I was actually pangender, which explained why I still liked my femininity alongside my masculinity, androgyny, agenderlessness, and everything in between and outside of it. I could not live as one without the other; I was whole as I already was. I still one day really want to wear a kurta and present as masculine as possible to a function, but I no longer hate saris like I used to.
What's more, is that I realized that part of the reason I felt a rift between myself and my Indian peers was my neurodivergence. The reason I didn't like watching Bollywood movies was that I simply disliked watching any movie with humans in them. That's exactly why I became attached to anime in the first place after all, despite its own culture being vastly different from my own. And due to my aroace-ness, I never had any crushes on Bollywood actors and while I enjoyed seeing actors act happy during the romantic parts of Bollywood movies (because I like seeing people be happy), I never really wanted any of that for myself. It was these realizations that made me begin to see those same Indian peers that I once envied with a sense of compassion and wonder - that there's so much about our backgrounds and identities that can make such similar people perceive things as differently as they do, and that contributes to the diversity within a culture.
But what really made my heart feel full was seeing all of the likes, reblogs, and comments on this post. I never really expected this post to gain so much traction - I just hoped that it'd make the day of the one or two people that happened to see it. But no - so many of you liked this post because you related to it and wanted to spread the message, a few of you reblogged saying how validated it made you feel, and some of you even added your own thoughts to the post about your own perspective, which I really loved reading. Y'all made me realize that I am not alone on this unique journey of exploring (and feel comfortable with!) my own Desiness. And that means the world to me.
Of course, this brings up the question: Am I more Desi now than I was before? And my resounding answer is... no.
Nothing about this exploration affected the past experiences that I'd been through. Nothing about this exploration invalidated any part of my identity that I'd previously felt. Nothing about this exploration made me feel inferior to anyone else.
All this exploration did was introduce me to some new perspectives and helped me access a worldview of thought that I hadn't seen before. It made me more in touch with my roots and with what I already had - but it didn't increase the amount of Desiness I had within me.
I encourage y'all reading this post to dive more into your roots and become more aware of how they intersect with other parts of your identity - not to become like your "more-aware" peers, but simply for yourself and to go further on your own journey in life. But if you don't want to or don't feel ready for that yet, that's okay too.
