At some point during every trip to Kerala, I crave Texas barbecue and hamburgers. Knowing Texas barbecue will be impossible to find, I head to the local bakery in search of a hamburger.
The Kerala hamburger resembles nothing found in the states, but I’m a fan anyway. I sink my teeth into two pieces of sweet bread hugging a spicy cutlet with raw onion, tomato and Kerala-style cole slaw.
Mornings are awesome because a full meal awaits.
When I told people I was going to major in communication in college, they looked at me like I was a fool.
“I thought you were smart,” said one uncle. “Why don’t you study to be a doctor?”
“You won’t find a stable job,” said another uncle. “You need to go into the medical field, and you’ll always find work.”
He later changed his mind and apologized.
My friends and I say our parents’ generation was about survival and stability. Work hard and put food on the table. They did very well for themselves out of faith and perseverance.
We’re starting our lives with huge advantages — access to people and information, familiarity and integration with the culture, access to money and education. Opportunities are everywhere.
Cloniness is the poison.
I hope this is not what we are. Someone tell me it's OK to have a personality, be aggressive and take life by the horns?
Posted in Shifting Identity, Vivan Las Mujeres, You're Not a Clone
Tagged ambition, boldness, career, personality, thinking
In our first year of college, my roommate and I were walking on campus and a row of four Malayalee guys walked past us. In a straight row and with an air of cockiness and self-diagnosed badass-ery so thick that even my white roommate — who hadn’t been previously informed about the douchebaggery some of these guys could emit — dryly commented: Here come the cool guys.
I don’t think a lot of us young people kept it real in the 90s or early 2000’s. We were steeped in trying to straddle at minimum two worlds. With our identities bouncing left and right. We didn’t know who to be.
Our parents did their best to create one life for us at home and church. But there was a totally different life waiting for us at school, work and everywhere else.
Our parents knew only their way. They didn’t have the context of youth life in America, and no one can blame them. So as much as they coddled us, we experienced our share of fending for ourselves and learning things the hard way.
I think trying to adapt and be cool outside of the home culture, that’s what bred the too-cool-for-school facades. Everyone did it at one time or another, just some did it way more than others. And it made the rest of us chant slogans like “Can I just get away from Indian people?”
It was hard to be unconditionally accepted in the home culture, and equally as hard everywhere else.
“Part of the problem in contemporary Christianity, I believe, is that talk about freedom of the Spirit, about the grace which sweeps us off our feet and heals and transforms our lives, has been taken over surreptitiously by a kind of low-grade romanticism, colluding with an anti-intellectual streak in our culture, generating the assumption that the more spiritual you are, the less you need to think.”
-N.T. Wright
Read more in Glenn Packiam’s Why Thinking is a Vital Part of Christian Growth.
For the past few years, I’ve found myself less interested in the praise and worship songs portion of church and pining for a deeper understanding of scriptures and their greater context.
What are the questions I need to ask that I haven’t been asking?
What spiritual myths have I been accepting just because I’ve heard them enough times? I recently heard that the Bible doesn’t state a requirement to be baptized before taking Holy Communion. Something I need to study for myself.
I had a friend who enjoyed the Presbyterian church because it was cerebral and not overly dependent on emotion.
Glenn Packiam says we should let Truth define Experience instead of letting Experience define Truth.
What can our churches do to be places that offer that type of truth? To be a place where it’s OK to think?
What can we do to be members that encourage truth-discovering?
What happened in your life that led you to find truth? Did it happen in a church or elsewhere?
Atheist Gina Welch faked a conversion, got baptized, went on a mission trip and attended Thomas Road Baptist Church for two years, taking detailed notes that she published in a book.
I’ve always struggled with the preaching-to-the-choir, inward-looking nature of the church.
I’m a believer, and though I attend churches and see good things come out of them, I also see how institutionalizing faith can lead to degenerating faith and advancing false teachings.
And institutionalizing faith also leads to clones, what I often call “stupid sheep,” who listen and accept their environment without thoughtfully questioning it.
This makes churches unwelcome places for people who don’t already believe. Plenty of times I’ve cringed in church at intolerant language, hoping that no non-believers were around to witness it.
Welch points out inconsistencies she saw in the church she attended and notes certain token phrases that don’t necessarily make sense to everyone.
“Evangelical language was a language of its own, where the rhetoric often didn’t mean what the words seemed to signify in English. Words were encoded symbols used to describe feelings evangelicals understood. Sometimes I was able to understand these feelings and crack the code on a turn of the phrase. But not so with the personal relationship with God. With this I scraped and scraped for a more direct meaning, but each layer I revealed was just another picture of a picture.” (236)
When you’ve been in the same culture or environment for years, of course everything makes sense to you. But does that rule still make sense when you leave that context?
Non-spiritual example: I’ve met people who think women can’t understand computer science or make 3-pointers in basketball. In their world, they have observed this consistently. In my world, I’ve observed the opposite. Just because you’ve consistently observed something in one context doesn’t make it universally true.
Spiritual example: Some people believe wearing jewelry or make-up means you are pleasing your flesh or being materialistic. While others see it as a neutral activity that has no bearing on spiritual identity.
Doubt, Debate and Decide
It’s when you step outside your box that you begin to doubt, debate and then either reject your previous views, adjust them or fortify them.
Two Ways To Avoid Being a Church Clone Continue reading
Posted in Churchiness, You're Not a Clone
I honestly think some of my cousins in India think I am a complete numskull.
Pluralism/diversity causes misunderstandings. An inability to understand the world, thoughts, worldview of someone from somewhere else. It causes conflict in the states. But I enjoy this diversity. I enjoy growing up with so many people and knowing their heart and their mind. When you know someone, you don’t think about their skin color or worry too much about “where they’re from.” You just appreciate them as a person, as someone like you.
Race is a human construct. Latino is not a race or even a color. Neither is the state of being black. News anchor Soledad O’Brien is culturally black, even though she is not deeply pigmented as such.
“Don’t let them tell you you’re not black,” her mother tells her. “Don’t let them tell you you’re not Hispanic or not Cuban.”
I don’t like checking my “race” on surveys. It waters down, mocks and misrepresents who I am.
I want to tell you who I am. Part of who I am. My roots. Raices.
I admire culture and the sense of community and resourceful engendered by many cultures. This is potentially my ignorance speaking, but I see most countries as very similar. Most countries outside of the United States and Europe. I see a sense of understanding of community. This exists in small towns in the states, too. I enjoy talking to people who grew up on a farm. It whispers parallels with my forebears in India with their chickens and goats and crops all around.
My India is not your India. It’s like the parable of the elephant and the four blind folks. One feels the trunk, the other feels the feet; one feels the tail, the other feels the belly.
Everything is different in Kerala, isn’t it?
I stood on a hill in Kozhencherry with my cousin Tijo. As we overlooked the city, I told him, “Do you realize you live in the most beautiful place in the world?”
I never wanted to be anything but what I am. Of Indian descent. Though I did want to be black for sometime. I think you end up wanting to be the people you’re around. I loved dark skin. Keralites were known for their dark skin. Mine wasn’t dark, though I wished it to be. It wasn’t until later I realized that some people are taught to look down on dark skin, which to this day I do not understand. It wasn’t taught in my household.
I remember the first time I learned about skin color.
Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/andreanna/2779781360/
Posted in Shifting Identity, Tales from the Motherland
Tagged diversity, india, kerala, pluralism, race, skin color
Kindergarten is fun. You play games and learn stuff. Our teacher taught us a song in sign language, then told us what it meant.
It was about all the cultures of the world, and how they thrived in their different regions. But these cultures started traveling to different places, leaving their homeland and starting anew elsewhere. The song was about how nice and peaceful the world would be if everyone just stayed in their homeland.
I went to kindergarten at a mostly black school with a white teacher.
One day some kids at recess wondered if it was OK for the black and white kids to play together, since they’d heard something about how those groups weren’t supposed to get along. Continue reading
If your identity is taken away, are you left with nothing?
If a people’s history is not written down, it’s as if it never happened. They are redefined to suit someone else’s whims.
I’ve always described India as a different planet. Every corner might as well be it’s own nation, with the mishmash of customs and dialects. You can’t look at someone of Indian descent and know their story.
India is snow-capped mountains, steamy nights, tropical paradise, scarcely bearable oppression, freedom of the highest kind, democracy, caste, religious oppression, religious amity.
India is diaspora.
Everyone is looking to go somewhere else. Or they have no idea a world exists outside their few kilometres.
Posted in Shifting Identity, Tales from the Motherland
How do you say “thank you” in Malayalam? For years, I didn’t know. Because I never heard the word.
Nanni.
Not that Malayalees are thankless people. Gratitude is just not often demonstrated in words, I suppose.
When in Kerala, Anthony Bourdain’s crew asked how to say “thank you” and started practicing the word. How funny, I thought.
Seven Dollar Stories 