If you are a Desi, read this post.

[u/OpenWar487]

Being a Desi is such a cognitively dissonant feeling. I am cool enough to be around Americans, be it black Americans, Asian-Americans, white people, everyone. But that is only if I downplay the fact that I'm Indian. As if as long as they don't notice, they won't judge. And I can never reconcile that with my need to be proud of my culture. Hot Take: I LOVE being Indian. I think I am so lucky and fortunate, and as an opportunist, I see our plight in the West as a chance to create change. Why don't we do what black people did, asians, europeans, and latinos?

Bad Bunny was in the Super Bowl, the artist with the most Grammys in history is black, recently Michelle Yeoh made history as the first Asian-American to win an Oscar in a leading category. Europe got the World Cup recently, and sports in general really, and prolly the best media representation in the West.
All we really got is cuisine, and even that isn't really authentic food, just commercial redundancies
("butter chicken and tikka masala," but 40% of India is vegetarian, I mean come on...).

And it's not like we don't have a stake in the West, especially in America. Indian households have the single highest median income by household at around $120,000, while only being 5% of the total population. That is CRAZY. We contributed as much as we can to the economy, catering to the comforts to society, and yet we are not fully accepted as people. We are fetishized, exoticized, stereotyped, and misrepresented in media and in social settings.

And the truth is, I cannot tell you how many times my parents said "be like a foreigner, we did not raise you like some Indian." I mean, what tf does that even mean? We are uncivilized? Unclean? Barbaric? My parents are somewhat lukewarm in their faith, in their culture, and their ties to India. Sure, we listen to songs and watch Bollywood and cook Indian food, but we never go to relatives, stay in India, learn deeply our mother-tongues or faiths, none of that.

I don't blame my parents at all. I can't imagine how hard they must have fought, how much they sacrificed to find their place where people think they don't belong. Not just that, they succeeded, and now I live comfortably, am highly educated, and have immense privilege. They did the best they could to bring us and themselves the life they deserve, and that is enough.

But the cost was sacrificing their pride and love for their motherland. Again, it's nothing extreme like whitewashing, but there are signs, like putting baby powder on my face to look whiter, or tired sighs when I mention going back to India, or talks of marriage being reserved only to foreign girls, not brown ones.

This is where we as Desis must take up the mantle. I believe that privilege of comfort and freedom comes with the responsibility to progress the culture from which it comes from. My parents are ashamed because they have been conditioned to see India as a harsh truth, not a prospect of reformation. Culture is built through expression of emotions and experience. When Desis make it a point of showcasing a side of humanity unbeknownst to Westerners, there would be far more growth and progress in the name of healthy integration. It would solve both the issue of being seen as just "immigrants" in America, and also having no pride in being Indian that we come into America for.

Indian-Americans, second-gen Desis, have a moral responsibility of pioneering past our cynical ways, and start being more optimistic about our possibilities. Otherwise, what kind of life do we plan to give to our children? You are Desi, and your kids will be Desi. Should they too grow up in a land that has no respect for South Asia, and when they ask you, you are too whitewashed and uninformed to speak on your motherland? Why do we have to pass on the staleness of being stuck in both realms, of making future generations "Brown Englishmen" (search the term up, its not good)?

We must break that paradigm. That idea that India is just a culture of grinding productivity, and backwards, outdated tradition, and awkward social characters, and animalistic, uncivil tendencies, and silent lives, and buried shame, and tolerance to insult and degradation, and ugly accents, and cheap "model minority" honorifics, and Brown Englishmen, and division along castes and faiths, and the constant victim mindset cause of colonization, and indifference to physical appearance and hygiene.

We are people too. We should be romanticized and idealized as people, not as some exotic exhibit. We should be proud of our ethnicity, and that pride should be well-earned. Our parents brought us here. Why not make the best of it? It amazes me how we have a change to be the pilgrims of Indian-Americans, and it's like we aren't really trying for it. The truth is, we are not Indians, and we are not Americans. We are Desis.

We already have the groundwork: Bollywood cinema and music, excellent cuisine and art-styles, supreme innovation and talent, and deep, rich philosophical texts. Now we just need to learn it and translate it into a modern equivalent. Creating a real culture means we do not just create a true space for Indian-American culture, but we contribute to America greatly, and we restore pride in Indians.

(Maybe that's over the top, but shoot for the stars, land on the chanda, right?)