Gayathri Menon, Grade 11
UWC Mahindra
As I sit on what seems to be the edge of the world (as my MUWCI peers lovingly call it), my feet dangle a mere two metres from the ground. It doesn’t feel like the same earth, let alone the same country. It wasn’t the loamy silt that the heavy monsoons churned with every downpour. It was drier and coarser, almost hostile to my feet. The ground beneath me was in no way representative of how the world around me was. There was warmth in the air, and no, it was not the Maharashtrian drought. From feeling the same warmth, I once felt bare-foot in Kerala, the southern part of India, to feeling the same in the central state of Maharashtra. However, the land felt completely different.
It’s no secret that India is extremely diverse – “Unity in Diversity” is our selling point, to start with. The reaction I had to cultural shift was involuntary- I became a sponge to the local way of life, and yet, I grew even more possessive of my own. Maybe it was a natural response, given that I was warned several times to not lose grip of what my earlier reality was. Fear of cultural loss during cultural immersion was real, especially when traditional upbringing has been the bed-rock of all your experiences.
Maharashtra was not all too different from Kerala, though differences did exist. How much of a difference could 1,200 kilometres make? In that line of reasoning, I forgot to factor in the distinct UWC culture. Now, I’m not speaking negatively about the culture, it is what made me want to attend in the first place, but there was a feeling of being overwhelmed. Understandable yet not quite. I grappled with losing the sense of identity I held on to, having been brought up in a traditional, disciplined household and now, I was meant to immerse myself into a way of life that would let me show up to class in pyjamas.
The new-found freedom and flexible way of life was not my problem. But I was dealing with a new dilemma- one that I’ve been beating around the bush about. When you bring in people with differences, you may expect conflict and clash, but there was more cohesion in MUWCI. The fear of losing the cultural self-identity while my adolescent self picked up the UWC way of life was daunting, to say the least. The question that I was confronted with when I vented to one of my friends was mind-boggling. “Aren’t you still in your own country, though? Why do you fear to lose your cultural identity when you’re in India itself?” I’m not sure if she intended it to have as much of an impact on me as it did.
I had held myself back to exploring the local culture, though not intentionally. MUWCI in its flora is awfully similar to where I grew up. It was located in a rural area, quite like the quaint village I grew up in. But the loud bustle of my mother tongue was not the same as the mellow humdrum of Marathi. The differences in culture within one national entity was amplified in every bend of the road, every mall, every busy street. Feeling out of place in your own country is a surreal experience. I was certainly overthinking, but for someone whose cultural identity had become synonymous to their self-identity, the fear was not unfounded.
The language, the social rules, the food was all familiar to me, but it was not my earlier reality. I grew up seeing what some of us call the “Mainland” or North-Central India represented in the media and was subconsciously accepting of its hegemony over the southern and northeastern way of life. Rice used to be the staple of my diet, then came the northern breads. Of course, it is a minute change compared to the international students, but my subconscious reaction and acceptance of the culture around me made me paranoid. I was able to pick up Marathi, converse more confidently in Hindi, but whenever my mom would call, I would beat myself over losing the flow of my own mother tongue, Malayalam.
“One of them” became the staple way of referring to me back home. It wasn’t a tag meant to offend or hurt, but it stung the new wound. So I held on to what I considered the pinnacle of my identity even more fiercely. I’d engage in as many activities that resembled home while despising the fact that I rejected new, unexplored ones.
Perhaps, it was a dilemma that was blown out of proportion by being a teenager on a slightly-isolated campus, teeming with life and people who live together with differences. Then came the question I dreaded asking myself- why had I not integrated into UWC culture as much as my peers had? Why wasn’t I relishing the new experiences, unbothered by what change awaits me at the next corner?
I had found myself holding on to my culture ferociously and without reason. Perhaps I wasn’t ready for change, another conclusion that I had jumped to. My peers, too, were faced with such questions. We all found ourselves confronting questions that knew no immediate answers but demanded our energy nonetheless. As adolescents wanting to confront some of the biggest challenges a global life has produced, we sure had to deal with questions of our own. I cannot lie and say I let myself become free of all apprehension I held while I stepped foot into the unknown. But MUWCI has been pivotal in what I’d call my “self-discovery”. The more I confronted my confusion front on, the less scary it seemed. It also helped that my friends were going through the motions along with me, all of us on our separate journeys on the same campus.
The campus seems like a speck on the map, the horizon stretches before my eyes, and I cannot say that the future is any clearer. But as I pick up my backpack to return home, saying a temporary goodbye to the culture, I once feared that I was absorbing sure is painful. The edge of the world, for now, will only stretch two metres down, the MUWCI sunset would only engulf the valley, but the ease with which we walked out of campus, albeit with heavy hearts and red eyelids, show that we had all become sponges, basking in the glory of belonging to a new community and having created newer extensions to our identity.
It’s no secret that India is extremely diverse – “Unity in Diversity” is our selling point, to start with. The reaction I had to cultural shift was involuntary- I became a sponge to the local way of life, and yet, I grew even more possessive of my own. Maybe it was a natural response, given that I was warned several times to not lose grip of what my earlier reality was. Fear of cultural loss during cultural immersion was real, especially when traditional upbringing has been the bed-rock of all your experiences.
Maharashtra was not all too different from Kerala, though differences did exist. How much of a difference could 1,200 kilometres make? In that line of reasoning, I forgot to factor in the distinct UWC culture. Now, I’m not speaking negatively about the culture, it is what made me want to attend in the first place, but there was a feeling of being overwhelmed. Understandable yet not quite. I grappled with losing the sense of identity I held on to, having been brought up in a traditional, disciplined household and now, I was meant to immerse myself into a way of life that would let me show up to class in pyjamas.
The new-found freedom and flexible way of life was not my problem. But I was dealing with a new dilemma- one that I’ve been beating around the bush about. When you bring in people with differences, you may expect conflict and clash, but there was more cohesion in MUWCI. The fear of losing the cultural self-identity while my adolescent self picked up the UWC way of life was daunting, to say the least. The question that I was confronted with when I vented to one of my friends was mind-boggling. “Aren’t you still in your own country, though? Why do you fear to lose your cultural identity when you’re in India itself?” I’m not sure if she intended it to have as much of an impact on me as it did.
I had held myself back to exploring the local culture, though not intentionally. MUWCI in its flora is awfully similar to where I grew up. It was located in a rural area, quite like the quaint village I grew up in. But the loud bustle of my mother tongue was not the same as the mellow humdrum of Marathi. The differences in culture within one national entity was amplified in every bend of the road, every mall, every busy street. Feeling out of place in your own country is a surreal experience. I was certainly overthinking, but for someone whose cultural identity had become synonymous to their self-identity, the fear was not unfounded.
The language, the social rules, the food was all familiar to me, but it was not my earlier reality. I grew up seeing what some of us call the “Mainland” or North-Central India represented in the media and was subconsciously accepting of its hegemony over the southern and northeastern way of life. Rice used to be the staple of my diet, then came the northern breads. Of course, it is a minute change compared to the international students, but my subconscious reaction and acceptance of the culture around me made me paranoid. I was able to pick up Marathi, converse more confidently in Hindi, but whenever my mom would call, I would beat myself over losing the flow of my own mother tongue, Malayalam.
“One of them” became the staple way of referring to me back home. It wasn’t a tag meant to offend or hurt, but it stung the new wound. So I held on to what I considered the pinnacle of my identity even more fiercely. I’d engage in as many activities that resembled home while despising the fact that I rejected new, unexplored ones.
Perhaps, it was a dilemma that was blown out of proportion by being a teenager on a slightly-isolated campus, teeming with life and people who live together with differences. Then came the question I dreaded asking myself- why had I not integrated into UWC culture as much as my peers had? Why wasn’t I relishing the new experiences, unbothered by what change awaits me at the next corner?
I had found myself holding on to my culture ferociously and without reason. Perhaps I wasn’t ready for change, another conclusion that I had jumped to. My peers, too, were faced with such questions. We all found ourselves confronting questions that knew no immediate answers but demanded our energy nonetheless. As adolescents wanting to confront some of the biggest challenges a global life has produced, we sure had to deal with questions of our own. I cannot lie and say I let myself become free of all apprehension I held while I stepped foot into the unknown. But MUWCI has been pivotal in what I’d call my “self-discovery”. The more I confronted my confusion front on, the less scary it seemed. It also helped that my friends were going through the motions along with me, all of us on our separate journeys on the same campus.
The campus seems like a speck on the map, the horizon stretches before my eyes, and I cannot say that the future is any clearer. But as I pick up my backpack to return home, saying a temporary goodbye to the culture, I once feared that I was absorbing sure is painful. The edge of the world, for now, will only stretch two metres down, the MUWCI sunset would only engulf the valley, but the ease with which we walked out of campus, albeit with heavy hearts and red eyelids, show that we had all become sponges, basking in the glory of belonging to a new community and having created newer extensions to our identity.
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