Skip to main content

Liberal Conservative

This evening I had a great conversation with a second generation Indian-American woman in her early twenties. Our parents come from a similar cultural backgrounds. They have tried to hot-house some Indian values into her while giving her the American way of life.

R has turned out to be an accomplished, articulate and a charming young woman thanks to her parents. "I am personally conservative yet socially and politically liberal. I often have to struggle to find someone that shares my combination of values" she says to me.

I tell her that I face the exact same struggle. In my view social and political liberalness do not have to translate to personal life and there is no dichotomy. Many liberals that I know cannot fathom that. It is like my liberalness is a sham because I don't apply it to my personal life.

R tells me there are second generation kids who think like her but they are still a minority. I am not surprised that Anil Dash talks about this unique state as well " ..being able to live both as a personally conservative son of immigrants and a politically liberal citizen of the United States.."

Many people of my generation and socio-economic milieu who grew up in India and have since been outside the country have a world view radically different from mine.

Their upbringing was very liberal. Any form of conservativeness was often viewed as an undesirable side effect of religious orthodoxy and shunned with a passion. With that they are true blue liberals, exceptionally well assimilated in America and wonderful people to know - except when personal values conflict.

Then there are those who are conservative all over. I find close to nothing in common with them even though I view myself as "personally conservative".
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t
111 comments
Read more

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha
5 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques
6 comments
Read more