My Parents: My Best Cheerleaders or wait - is it really myself?

I've gone through a couple different phases in my life.

When I was a child, my academics were great but I was not too keen on other things that are important components of a well-balanced personality like having an active interest in music and sports or even more generally in building and maintaining good friendships. My early schooling took place in a society where popular people were those who were good at sports and generally presented themselves well. After this, I moved to India where family, friends, and academics were the most important things to master. Of these three things, as you can see from one of my previous blog posts, I was shown that academics was the most important to master and I slowly got to work mastering it in the Kristu Jyoti state syllabus school (ICSE, CBSE, and State syllabi being the prominent options for what syllabus we could choose arranged in higher to lower ranking)

When I was a high achiever, people often asked me about what motivates me.

I think that people are all relatively similar, so I'd like to paraphrase the words of a famous columnist, Mary Schmich, where she gives advice about How Not to Write in a 2003 column that I am presently reading in her book Even The Terrible Things Seem Beautiful To Me Now:

1. Do not try to write like Ernest Hemingway. Absolutely never try to write like Dave Barry. What works for them is apt to make you look foolish. On the other hand, feel free to do what one famous writer did early in her career, which is to type out pages of her favorite writer's writing to get a feeling for how he structured sentences. Or keep good writing handy - I particularly like poems for this purpose - and when your brain is locked, read for a while. Feeling other writers' words and rhythms can loosen up your own.

2. Do not wait for inspiration. You don't need inspiration to write. You need a deadline. If you write only when you're inspired, you'll have dust-free floors, a gleaming toilet, mounds of clean underwear - and a blank computer screen.

Oh, to be a high achiever again. Guess all I'll need to do is start doing me and setting deadlines for myself.

Most likely to transfer if the ARC pool closes

After I got back from my quick trip to Chicago for the memorial, I went to Athens, Ohio to do some good work with 13 strangers. I went on an organized 'Alternative Spring Break' trip that held weekly orientations so I had met all of the people before but I hadn't really gotten to know anyone until we left.

During the week I got to do so many amazing things- from having meals with those who were struggling with homelessness or poverty and other crises situations; to powerwashing decks, varnishing wood, tilling fields, drywalling, cleaning up an old lady's home, and shoveling manure- I feel like I did everything! These were all really awesome experiences and the gratitude shown by the people we helped (along with frosted lemon poppy seed muffins!) improved my sense of accomplishment.

The highlight of my week however, was the people I went with (we ended up calling ourselves Team Warrior Clan) and the relationships we got to build. By the time we had gotten to Athens on Sunday evening, 13 strangers were starting to become friends. The roadtrip was great. We discussed key concerns common to humanity, sang along to all kinds of different songs, and heard a great solo- which was to become the TWC group song: Africa by Toto. The only other group of people that I have interacted with so quickly and became so close with was group 34 of Teach and Learn with Georgia during our weeklong orientation in Tbilisi and we were all planning on living in that country for the next few months. Everything about this trip went perfectly so I've got to give major props to our trip facilitators, Sana Singh and Sharon Singh for picking great bonding activities and perfectly organizing every aspect of our trip. I can't imagine how they could have facilitated a better experience for everyone involved. We all got really lucky with the other participants who got to join our trip. Every single person was so fascinating, unique, and had so much to contribute. I have never even heard of a group of people where everything took place so seamlessly and everyone cooperated and went out of their way to make sure that each one of us had a great trip.

One of the things that the TF's did to make this trip so successful was have our mid-week reflection be 4 minute life stories. 

Expressions of Faith in India and America

Having grown up in both India and America, and lived for extended periods of time in Georgia, Spain, Costa Rica, Germany, and Italy- I have lived with a wide variety of people from all different types of religious and spiritual backgrounds. Religion was always an important part of my upbringing and my parents were very dedicated to their values and understanding of a higher power. Furthermore, my childhood was influenced a great deal by a wide variety of Catholic influences. My grandfather stressed that I wake up at 5:30 in the morning in order to attend daily mass when I lived with him. My boarding schools in India also had a similar approach.

Ever since I was young, I struggled to reconcile my understanding of faith and the world around me with my daily life and actions. I took a year off in between seventh and eighth grade and I remember that, during this year, I felt like there were a great deal of inconsistencies with my own public and private expression of my faith and that of those who were close to me. I felt like it was weird for people to be hypocritical and didn't understand why people sometimes lived lives that seemed to be duplicitous. Since I was an American person living in India, I felt like many people were more open with me than they were in general and they assumed that my worldview would be more tolerant of a liberal lifestyle.

I was at the memorial mass of my dad's oldest brother and I had a pretty interesting conversation with my cousin at the luncheon afterwards. We had not really talked about religion until then but we had a pretty in depth conversation. We had a lot of common ground and it seemed like we both felt that people in America generally try to make a lot more logical approach to religion than the approach in India that seems to be more dogmatic. However, we disagreed on one key issue- she felt that Americans incorporated the social justice applications of the teachings of our faith more seriously than people in India and that people in India are more focused on helping their family and community but are less sensitive to social problems and larger injustice. I feel like she should have been a bit more nuanced in her approach towards the issue. Though it looks like what she had stated objectively seems to be correct, I feel like a lot of religious groups- including Syro Malabar Catholics (whom she had explicitly stated tend to be less sensitive) try to do their part in making the world a better place....