First Person is a daily personal piece submitted by readers. Have a story to tell? See our guidelines atSometimes, you make a choice without knowing the reason why. Something pushes you, nothing that can be described with legible words or ideas. Even “instinct” is too stiff. Maybe it’s something like a lava lamp: Picture those amorphous and shifting blobs as forces that make your stomach drop or your eyes light up.
Growing up, my identity didn’t mean much to me: brown-skinned, Indian, second-generation. It wasn’t that I rejected my background – I completed the usual diaspora checklist of learning classical Bharatanatyam, celebrating Diwali and watching Karan Johar films. But cultural participation feels hollow when you don’t know the origins of these practices, or anything substantive about the country they come from.
Yet something inside me bubbled over when I was selecting a destination for a university exchange. Places I’d dreamed of visiting suddenly looked stale. I discovered Ashoka University, a liberal arts school in north India, and the lava lamp blobs started nudging me. As I scoured course descriptions and campus photos, a plan began to form.