The Burden of Cultural Expectations

People seldom dwell on why they are driven to do what they do. Those who aren’t forced to live in the shadow of a spouse, attribute it to ambition. But what drives your ambition? Isn’t it the parameters you heard as a child? The values your parents touted? The deeds and outcomes your society praised? Only seldom is it the exact opposite of the above, if your childhood was traumatic…but even so, it is still the driver of your actions because now you live to negate those very situations that influenced the panorama of your particular youth.

So, what propelled me at near fifty to “make something of myself” when more than half my life was behind me? It certainly wasn’t the American society I lived in. They couldn’t care less what I did, and my friends loved me just as I was. My children too were busy achieving their dreams to ever pause and consider that I too had been young once…only I had given up my youth to ensure that they had better lives than the one I had endured. Hey, I’m not blaming them. I fully embrace that kids don’t ask to come into this world…having mine was my decision…so it behooved me to honor that responsibility.

But how many young mothers really know or understand what they are undertaking when a careless night, or a date, or a foolish transgression overtakes their lives? By the time they do...they can’t shove the kid back to where it came from. Brutal but true. I should know. My mother was one of those very young and very deluded women. Only once she realized her mistake, she glibly foisted me off on her parents, and skipped off to bigger and better things.

To my utter chagrin, I was one of those young women too…however, unlike my mother, or perhaps because of her example, I chose to do right by the kids I had engendered.

That’s why I was a fifty-year-old loser today with nothing to show for my own life. But hell, I wasn’t alone in that boat. My sad story was the story of at least two billion other women the world over. Many of those women had settled to the sacrifice they had made…happy and proud to sit and rest in the long shadow of their children’s achievements. So, why couldn’t I be like them? Why was I driven by this personal regret of never having done anything for myself?

The answer was the kind of family I hailed from. The country I was born into: India.

Now assuming that anyone is even reading my bloody blog, I would have to venture to guess that, that person is a foreigner, i.e., a non-Indian, since the internet is worldwide. For that reader, I could break down the very complex snobbery that chokes all Indians….to exactly no purpose. Who except my own countrymen would care or be influenced by what goes on in India?

Instead, let’s talk about something more familiar to my foreign readers: the Indian immigrants one sees outside India, in my case, in America.

This is what foreigners don’t see right off the bat…they don’t know and can’t distinguish if the Indian they see is a first-generation immigrant, or a second-generation one, and the difference is mind boggling. 

A first-generation Indian (or any immigrant really) carries their mother or fatherland on their back, like the turtle bears the burden of its shell as an undetachable body part. So physically, they are in America, but their minds are ruled by their own country’s values. I won’t discuss the second-generation immigrant here or this blog post will become too long.

To come back to my story, I am one of those first-generation Indians. But of course, since I speak English well, my American friends are unable to even conceive what goes on in my mind, let alone understand what drives my actions.

So here is a window into what plagues my thinking…my reasoning. :))

In India, other than the snobbery of the caste system for the Hindus, what segregates us is education.

There are those Indians who seek and pursue education like a religion…and the other, trade family Indians, who pursue their trade like a religion….and never do the two ever mix. In the rare case that some offspring of the trades people seeks higher education, he is so confused by this pursuit, he doesn’t belong anywhere…and his parents understand him even less. The dilemma gets worse if you are a girl, but that’s a whole other topic.

Don’t believe me? 

Take a look at statistics. Most educated first-generation Indians in America are either doctors (I haven’t yet met a first-generation Indian nurse, or a nurse’s-aid), or college professors, or work in technology, or else in engineering. And when last did you see an Indian beggar, or an Indian homeless person, or too many Indian criminals?

What you do also see frequently is the Indian trade family member who owns a gas station, a convenience store, or a liquor store. And this is what most foreigners (to India, I mean) never realize: these two kinds of Indians populate separate planets. They don’t mix. Their children don’t mix. And they certainly don’t inter-marry.

When a trade family Indian has money to spare, he doesn’t send his kids to Harvard—he buys another convenience store. And when the educated Indian has extra money—he accesses Ivy League schools for his children, or a house in a posh neighborhood, and of course, the all-time Indian favorite: the fanciest car.

We won’t talk about the Indian taxi drivers in NYC. They’re a universe onto themselves…like French perfume is to France, in Europe.

Now, as the first generation Indian that I am, my special burden to carry, (other, of course, than my Hindu Muslim half-caste status which I will take to my grave), is that both sides of my family are the “educated” kind, filled with overachievers of no mean repute. However, in the hubris of youth, given my frantic desire to flee India, I dropped out of college to marry a foreigner, since it was my only escape option.

And I did escape India—I just never managed to catch up on my education, and much less, make something of myself. Therefore, approaching fifty, when I finally had a minute’s peace to contemplate my own existence—the shame of never having achieved any personal success like so many of my family members began to eat me alive.

Indian that I am, I couldn’t overcome this cultural bias. This snobbery that had propelled my impoverished grandma to enroll me into one of the best schools in the Delhi of my time…because anything less would have been unacceptable.

That was what drove me at fifty to try and achieve something…even if that “something” was as unlikely as becoming a successful writer. To me it didn’t even matter if I never made it…what mattered was that making the effort allowed me to live with my snobbish Indian self. It permitted me to think that as long as I was engaged in trying…I was not a total failure. I fully realize how this perception solely lives in my head…but it’s the only head I’ve got…the turtle shell I can’t escape.

Take a minute and identify your own cultural bias :)) it’s a fascinating exercise.