(Actual) Indian Education

"When I first saw America, I began shirking my Indian-ness and wholly adopting American culture in an attempt to fit in. I spent the better part of my teenage years acting as though my own culture was backwards, primitive, and something worth being ashamed of."

~Nikita Mandhani (freelance writer for Teen Vogue"

                   

First Grade

My hair was too messy and my voice was way too loud and assertive, all that first year at school the other kids didn't really get me. They mispronounced my name on purpose, made fun of the food I brought to lunch and I wondered why kids just like me didn't see me as an equal. 

They put their hands above their heads in an indian dancer pose and asked me, "Raagini! Raagini! is this how you dance?" "Raagini! Raagini! Is this how you talk?"

I was always falling into a trap. Some trap with words that I hadn't yet learned how to manuver around yet. It was because I was too bold, too outspoken, it was far too easy to get me to slip up. It was far too easy to get me to say something that had a double meaning that I didn't intend it to have. I have always said that Satire is the best form of persuasion. Satire ridicules an argument to the point where it cannot even stand up to defend itself because the opposers are too busy laughing. And what was the argument this time? That I was a well-rounded, normal, person who deserved as much respect and friendship as the next one.

Second Grade

John Smith, a classmate, redheaded and so meaty and popular that no one ever dared to cross him made me hate myself for fourteen days straight. 

"I'm sorry", he said.

"Y-you were making fun of India, you don't like me because I'm Indian!".

There. I had layed it all out. The feelings that had been bubbling within me for the past year spewed out of me when I made that accusation. The teacher had been lucky enough to deal with me during the tearstained outburst.

"Honey, what exactly did he say?" Miss Burton asked.

"He wouldn't stop using an indian accent and saying, "I'm Raagini, I'm from Indiana. I eat curry and in my spare time I cheer for the Colts"

John turned red. Funny. One of the only handicaps that white people is the ability of superiors to know when they are lying or embarrassed, yet the little ones always seem to get away with it. They are too sweet, too cute, too much the very pictures of  young all-American boys.

"No!" John cried. "I-I- you see I was just trying to make India BIGGER! By adding Indiana to it".

He put a hand on my shoulder and it felt sick and slimy. If it were me now I would have given him a cold chuckle. What a BS answer: to make India bigger? But the teacher accepted it. And I never realized why he didn't get in trouble until now. Racism is a touchy subject and no one expects a little Indian second-grader to call her white classmates out on it.  Obviously with no punishment he didn't stop poking fun at me, until he got old enough to realize that discounting an entire group of people because of the color of their skin was stupidity in itself. Either way, whatever bond I felt with India was broken that day. 

I said, No, I'm not. I am not Indian. American I am.

Third Grade

My forecasted 7-11 cashier career began with my very first day as cashier of Mrs. Coronado's class shop. I gave the kids soda (a rare delicacy), jewelry, knick-knacks and whatever else they wanted for the points they earned for being good; and I loved it.

As I gleefully picked out what I wanted before all the other kids (as the cashier was allowed to do) I heard someone whisper, "wow! what a teacher's pet". I discounted the comment and went on to pick out a pair of black, heart-shaped earings that I still have today. But that comment bit at me, why was I a teacher's pet, I didn't even particularly like Mrs. Coronodo. In a parent teacher conference, she told my mom and dad that I walked like a penguin in the hallways (Eight years later and I still don't know what this means). I guess it was like when kids asked me sarcastically, "Raagini, do you love school?" 

Well, I didn't hate it? Who doesn't like learning things, and writers workshop: God! I loved writer's workshop. But did that mean I liked getting up everyday early in the morning and doing math problems, hell no! Just because I'm decently smart doesn't mean I loved school. Then they would ask me if I loved math and they seemed genuinely surprised when I replied with a "no". Why did I have to like math? Why couldn't I prefer writing instead? Why did these kids all box me into the same category? I waited in earnest for the generalizations to end.

I'm still waiting.

Epilogue

There are a lot of things I could talk about growing up Indian and going to an American school system. I could talk about the expected friend groups in middle school. I could talk about just this year when my good friend told me she was pleasently surprised to meet me because her first experience with an Indian girl was a weird smelly chipmunk-faced middle-schooler who wouldn't take a shower or a hint. I could talk about that time in fourth grade when we were nine, and dumb and discussing which girl would look cute with which boy and the white boys took one look and my Indian friend and paired her up with the only other Indian guy in the class. They said it "made sense". I don't know. I've grown up a lot since those awful Elementary and Middle School days. I've found people who know how outspoken and loud I am, people who know I occasionally stumble over saying dumb things and don't write off my ideas for it (SHOUTOUT TO VAL'S CLASS). I've found people who not only don't make fun of my culture, but embrace it. Maybe my experience was a lot worse than most other first-generation kids, probably because in addition to being an Indian-American I was pretty darn weird. But I'm growing and I'm learning. And slowly but surely, I'm learning how to love who I am again.

An Exercise in Restraint: Not Political Cartoons

“What would a respectful political cartoon look like?”
― Salman Rushdie

Political cartoons are exactly that, political. There is no way for anything that is political to not be considered biased because the entire basis of the political system is to be biased either to the left or to the right. Political cartoons are staged admist controversy. If life's great social debates took place on a warzone, political cartoons would be right in the middle where the two sides are about to smash into each other. I've said it before and I'll say it again, there is no stronger persuasive technique than satire. By making fun of the opposing argument, satirists essentially dismantle any modicum of respect their opposer might have had at some point. Take this political cartoon for instance, there is probably no better point of controversy than the abortion debate, in order to further push the argument into the danger zone, the author not only dicusses his views on abortion, he also bends the public's comfort zone to a snapping point. By bringing the attacks on abortion clinics into the light he ventures the opposing argument to think about if they agree with the attacks, and if not, why would they not go to the same level of extremism. The hypocrisy in the actions of the man who killed people inside of an abortion clinic comes in the form of this man claiming he is "pro-life" and then taking away the lives of those who opposed his argument. Another argument that mirrors this one is one that I saw on the internet a couple of months back. It stated: Dear transphobic parents, remember when you got asked if you wanted the baby to be a boy or a girl and you said you didn't care? Why do you care now?" By going back to the original argument and satirically pointing out the hypocrisy, political cartoonists and other persuasive authors who do this are easily able to dismantle their opposition's argument by casting doubt on their reliability.

The Clan of First Generation Americans

"Once you are an immigrant, you never forget that you are one."

~ Jorge Ramos

I belong to a clan of First Generation Americans. My mother and father both came to America from India. I recently came across a group of seven people who shared not just this fact but many other traits with me. Four are Indian-Americans. The three who remain are various mixtures of French, Chinese, Australian, Indian, and South African. 

I've had my doubts about being involved in the past. I went through elementary and middle school believing that I was the only girl like me out there. Or, there were others who had the same story, but none of them were as "unique" as I was. 

This is my history.

Most people tell us that racial integration is complete, existing, that it has only risen in this nation which we call the land of the free and the home of the brave. What they don't say is that the feeling of being different because of a color you wish you could scratch off of your hands never really goes away. And being part of an all-Indian friend group doesn't help either.

Is my clan a cultural anomaly? The truth is, I didn't think about it. All I noticed was how at home I felt around people who looked so different than me and yet, spoke the truth that had been screaming in my mind ever since I got on that  first school bus that took me to the beginning of my relationship with the American Public School System. 

Two months ago, I was approached by my public library's librarian and I was asked if I wanted to participate in a spoken word poetry competition. She spoke of the rules and general thesis of the competition and with each word she spoke my eyes lit up in anticipation. I decided to do it. 

During one of the first meetings, we discussed what our group poem would be about. I shared a memory of mine that had been singed into the flesh of my subconscious. I told the group that for years as long as I could remember, people had spoken to me a certain way. A certain way that my family members did not speak to me in and a way that my indian friends didn't. But this condescention that I felt from the white kids took a staggaring toll on me. It all started when that boy in the back of the school bus told me I was going to hell for not being a Christian. The air seemed to vibrate with tension. I was a kid, barely six years old, how was I going to reply to that? The rest of the six year olds didn't know what to make of me either after that.

"He really said that to you?" Zamashenge, the South-African American girl asked.

"Yes" I replied. "It was a common occurrance in my childhood. Several years after, my cousin faced the exact same threat from a neighbor."

At that moment I realized the veil of darkness I had been living under. Children treating me as separate and different felt terrible, but it also felt normal. So normal that going to school everyday I didn't expect to be treated equally by the white kids- I didn't demand it. I didn't realize that there were other like me, people who grew up believing they were different only to know in their brains they were the same, if not better. People who knew the struggle, my struggle- members, years later, of the Clan of First Generation Americans. 

The Death of the Moth and Virginia Woolfe

"My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?"

~Virginia Woolfe

This woman is quite frankly one of the most badass authors I have ever had the pleasure of analyzing. As an introspective, sharp-tongued, bisexual, feminist in an open-relationship with her husband, Woolfe screams about her contemporary ideals in a world that was not ready for her. If Woolfe were alive today I am confident that she would be a proud spokeswoman for the LGBTQ+ movement. Her bestselling novel Mrs. Dalloway implies several same-sex relationships that really hit home in the way they so rawly they portrayed the experience of realizing one's attraction to the same sex. Being an outspoken and empowered woman it is clear that Woolfe is not exactly hot for humility; she cares more about getting her message out into the world rather than trying to stay humble. In my personal opinion everyone would do well to fondly look back on authors such as Virginia Woolfe, who used her powerful control over the english language to speak truth into the homophobic and patriarchally-driven society of her time. In The Death of a Moth, Woolfe not only documents her thesis: Death has power over all living things, but also reveals to her audience as well as the world key traits that peg her as a potentially suicidal individual. A preoccupation or fascination with death is a key red flag for someone who is considering suicide. The fact that this message was so clearly conveyed in some of Woolfe's final works is a sort of final haiku on her part of making peace with her suicidal decision. Woolfe's publishing of The Death of the Moth and Other Essays was her final hurrah before she went on to kill herself. Hereafter, she decided, there would be no more words, there would only be the Death that eventually came to claim all living

Woolfe's Suicide Note

things and now came to claim herself. Woolfe treats Death like (to use Rowling's words) an old friend, in that she utilizes the rhetorical strategy of personification indirectly. Instead of directly stating that Death is a being, Woolfe implies it through her analysis of the Moth's life and death. By doing this she personifies Death in a way that leaves him with an eerie, ghostly, image that is half-real and half-abstract. Woolfe created for herself a persona of eloquence and confidence. She made the world believe she was a strong-minded woman who did what she wanted to do. Even this woman who is on level with Ghandi in terms of eloquence and revere still was not a perfect human being. This woman who was a brilliant artist of vernacular still committed suicide. I think what makes Woolfe great is not her command of language nor her powerful demeanor, but her rawness. Woolfe's utter realness as a person makes no apologies. She is looked up to because she was a normal person who wasn't afraid to go after what she wanted. She asked for no apologies. She asked for no one's permission, Woolfe did what Woolfe wanted. And Woolfe was absolutely brilliant.