Musings of a 19-year-old Mind: Brown and Proud

Written by me a few years ago...

Are you proud to be an Indian?

This was the question posed to our 9^th grade class by a teacher on Independence Day. Clearly, she was expecting a unanimous roar of yes – which is what she got. But what she wasn’t expecting was to find a trickle of students here and there that stayed mutely silent. So when she asked these students to stand up and explain themselves, the class suddenly hushed down, staring at the standing figures in obvious disbelief.

Trying hard to ignore these blatant stares, I mentally began to search for an explanation. But I couldn’t find one – at least, not one that I could put into words. How do you explain something when you don’t quite understand it yourself? It’s not like I had anything against India – definitely not, and I made this quite clear to everyone. But that didn’t automatically mean that I was proud of it either. There was just…no feeling.

Would you feel undeniably proud if you were called an earthling? Does your heart stir up in passion and excitement every time you hear the word ‘Earth’ or ‘World’? Exactly. Mine didn’t either, because to me, India was my entire world. I don’t mean this in a cheesy sort of way, but that is literally how I felt about it. I had never lived out of India, or in a place where I wasn’t surrounded by Indians. To me, foreigners meant anyone who was not Indian. ‘South-Asian’ meant little to me, because my geography classes only covered the categories of continents, countries and cities, none of which include ‘South Asia’. Back then, if someone had called me ‘brown’, I would have been terribly offended. I mean, seriously, brown??? That’s how you would identify me?!?!

Just so you know, that was five years ago. And five years can be a long time.

People often say that it’s easy to criticize something from the outside; you need to actually get involved in it to truly understand it. I worked in the opposite direction. While I was in India, I never understood it. Sure, I understood the population, pollution and poverty crises, but I never actually understood what was there to be proud of. The cows sleeping in the middle of a busy road, oblivious to the traffic jam they had caused?

Not likely.

But stepping away from it all, I missed it – all of it. And it was in those moments of home-sickness that I started to realize what India meant to me. It’s the only place where you find more people walking on the roads than driving on them. It’s where you can eat pav bhaji and pani puri from the street without a care about hygiene issues. It’s where you can spend two days playing cards in a jam-packed train that has already been delayed by ten hours because it chose to stop in the middle of nowhere. It’s where you can switch between Hindi and English in any random conversation without having to think about it.

Basically, it’s home. And that makes all the difference in the world.

Realizing what India means to me, I now feel like I actually have a sense of identity in this world. I can proudly say that I am an Indian, and that pride comes not from ‘culture and heritage’, but from those small insignificant moments that I could have only experienced in India. Call it pride, call it what you will.

I call it being brown.