Tuesday, March 11, 2008

NA


Another reason, probably the most important one is that when I have kids, I want to be prepared for this generation's trends in India.


I cannot bring up kids while I am still taking my own childhood as an example. And worse still, raise them in the US while doing that. First of all I am not prepared for what their generation is up to. Because the only examples of kids I have seen is back home and back in my age. My friends are slowly having kids one after the other and maybe if I hang around enough, I will learn what to expect from kids these days growing in the US. Even if I am prepared for it at that point, can I accept my kids being even partly American? No. And is it fair to the kids to expect them to be Indian while being brought up in a culture that is so extremely diagonal to everything Indian? No. A big NO. And I don't like to give my kids the raw end of the deal. A lot of people think, ohh kids will be Indian enough. Its up to the parents to bring them up properly. And I ask, what is proper? Dichotomizing kids? Sorry, that is in no way acceptable. We are off the hook. We imbibed everything from our environment in our formative years. To expect kids to be as Indian as we are, while they are surrounded by an extremely different environment is highly unfair to them. There is a reason why the Indian-origin kids here get labeled ABCDs. And so I will move. If I want them to be Indian, I will raise them in India. I cannot tolerate them even being partly American, so they will not spend their childhood here.

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