What Can I Bring to the Picnic?
Growing up, my Indian and Tamil identities were ones that I often felt burdened by and ashamed of.
I attended a local neighborhood elementary school, where I was one of a handful of Indians. I would bring Indian food that my Mom cooked for lunch, but after hearing kids calling it "messy", I didn't want to bring Indian food anymore. I would only bring a PB&J and goldfish for lunch everyday, fearing the difficulties of not fitting in. I would continue this way until high school, when I became more comfortable with Indian food. I started attending Tamil school during the weekends when I was in elementary school, yet I was one of the few that failed the exams. I was taught that a primary part of my Tamil-ness was through knowing the language, which left me feeling inadequate; as though part of my identity was missing. All of this made me feel I wasn't Indian enough, Tamil enough, that I just didn't fit in.
If you're Asian, you're Smart
For middle and high school, I attended a magnet school. It was around this time that my parents got divorced, and it was quite a rough period for me. I had to live 2 separate split lives between my parents, switching back and forth every few days, and it was just a lot to maintain. If I asked my Dad about why this was happening to me, he would tell me that I was paying for the sins of my previous births, an answer that was quite unsatisfying to me. I slowly lost any faith that I had in the Hindu gods. I also started wishing that I had never been born, that seemed like it would have solved many problems. Through this, I put my hope in time passing and college nearing, that life would get better as soon as I was able to escape from my parents. Losing faith in Hinduism made me feel like I had lost the last part of my Indian and Tamil identity, and so I started looking for other places in which I could find my identity. Academics became a safe haven for me, and I threw myself fully into school. I started associating my identity with my grades and GPA, what I considered to be my intelligence. Through hearing comments like “if you’re Asian, you’re smart”, I felt like “smartness” was the core of who I was.
I'm not Indian, I'm Human
Going into college, I still found my identity in my intelligence. And it was validated during my freshman year. I thought college would be much more difficult than high school, but found myself doing academically well. I joined leadership in engineering clubs and published papers. I was cruising. I felt validated in finding my identity in my intelligence.
During sophomore year, the main thing on my mind, as well as nearly all of my friends' minds, was recruiting - getting an internship for next summer. I started applying to internships, getting referrals, and attending career fairs, sometimes even at other universities, all in a bid to get an internship. Yet, although I was doing the very same things that my friends did with very similar resumes as them, I wasn’t able to get a single interview, while my friends and my fellow teammates in engineering clubs seemed to be getting interviews and offers every other week. I tried reviewing my resume with other people and worked to improve it, but that didn’t seem to help. I learned recruiters preferred juniors over sophomores, and I had enough credits to graduate early, so I changed my graduation date, but that didn’t seem to help either. For months, I tried various recommendations and suggestions but nothing I did seemed to help, and I was just really confused and baffled as to why I couldn’t get an interview.
Now, around the same time as this internship hunt, in the middle of my sophomore year, a friend introduced me to the Asian InterVarsity chapter at my school. I started exploring the Christian faith, through AIV and church, what it means to believe in Christ and just the character of the Christian God. There was something about God being a loving God, that just hooked me, and just made me want to know more. Yet I still didn’t question my beliefs about my identity. I didn’t believe that my Indian or Tamil identity was important, even declaring to my campus minister that “I’m not Indian, I’m human.”
Trapped
And then Covid hit. I was sent home from college to an extended spring break. I had friends lose internships yet find another within a matter of days, leaving me questioning again what was wrong with me. The summer started and I had nothing to do - no job, no school - so I spent my days mostly just thinking, trying to analyze what had gone wrong, what to do next. I was trapped in my house, trapped in my room, and worst of all trapped in my own mind. I felt ashamed that I wasn’t able to live up to expectations from parents, my friends, and just myself. To avoid seeing people, both family as well as friends over zoom, I went nocturnal, sleeping during the day and staying up at night. And even when I did sleep, I just wouldn’t get any rest.
There was this one night, about 3 or 4 months after spring break, during the summer between my sophomore and junior year, I just broke down. Fall recruiting season for the next summer was just about to start, and I wasn’t sure if I would be able to continue living if I went through this rejection again for yet another season. I had put all my hope and faith in college, that things would get better once I got to college, but I found myself again wishing I had not been born, contemplating why I should continue living. I felt so broken, that was the moment I truly surrendered before God. I was just utterly defeated, there was nothing I could do and I couldn’t do it by myself. That is when I truly realized that it was only with God that I could hope to live and dream. God didn’t need to prove himself to me anymore, I just needed God. And I prayed, I didn’t even say or think any words, I just sat there crying and praying with my heart. I went to sleep after that and the next day was the first in a very long time that I actually felt well-rested after I slept.
Nothing really changed the next day or week, and I grew more anxious around finding an internship. After all, what was the point? There was nothing to add to my resume, except changing my graduation date back to normal, so, why would any company change their mind about me? I spent less time applying to far fewer internships than the hundreds I had the year before. Suddenly, I got interview requests from several companies and opportunities started opening up. Recruiters were asking me to do interviews, and many of these turned into offers.
My Cup Overflows
There was a time in small group during my junior year, where I was sharing about another offer I had gotten. We read Psalm 23, where it talks about a God who leads his flock to greener pastures, which God had done for me emotionally. I connected so much to this God who comforts even when we’re walking through the darkest valley, which I felt on that day when I felt the most broken. I connected to this God who provides so much that "my cup overflows"- I saw my cup overflow with offers and interviews. It was during that small group that I realized God's provision, God's faithfulness and God's steadfast love for his people, and for me. And so, I started believing in the Christian God, and after reflecting more on other ways God had acted in my life, I started following Jesus.
What to Bring to the Picnic
As I began following Jesus, I started questioning who I was and what my identity meant. I could no longer derive my identity from this so-called intelligence, having been greatly humbled. Through sermons in church, I was told that my identity should lie solely in Christ, but what did this mean for my ethnicity? I attended an Asian and Asian American ethnic specific ministry, which led me to investigate my ethnicity. But as the only South Asian, I was forced to question for the first time whether I was even Asian. I began investigating the intersection of ethnicity, culture, and faith. My campus minister used the metaphor of a picnic for the kingdom of God. She said one way to view it is like a picnic, where people of all tribes, tongues, nations, of all ethnicities come together to share their food- their culture- with each other. I was quite intrigued by this metaphor, but I questioned what I would bring to this picnic. What would I be able to share about my culture and ethnicity? I didn’t feel very connected to my ethnicity or culture, whether it be my Indian-ness or my Tamil-ness. Yet although I didn’t feel connected, I felt challenged to learn more about my cultural heritage and through that to find things to bring to this picnic as part of my Indian and Tamil identities.
Naturally, the first thing I thought of to bring to this picnic was food. Food felt like the only way I still felt somewhat connected to my Indian identity, as I would eat Indian food everyday. However, I didn’t actually know how to cook Indian food myself, since I would just rely on my Mom’s cooking at home and the Indian place on campus. I felt like if I wanted to bring food to this picnic, I should make it myself, so I was inspired to learn how to cook Indian food. I was home doing a virtual internship between my junior and senior year, so I asked my Mom to teach me the classic Indian recipes. She was quite surprised and suspicious that I was showing interest in something that I had never asked about once before, but she relented and agreed to teach me and translate recipes from Tamil to English. I started out by making a basic recipe everyday. Initially, the numerous spices and dals in my Mom’s cabinets were quite intimidating, but through continuous practice and testing and tweaking of recipes I was able to start making somewhat tasty food. Through this growth in cooking, I am slowly but surely gaining the experience that will allow me to share this part of my culture with the kingdom of God.
At the start of my senior year, I began contemplating the next thing that I would bring to this picnic. I started having this growing desire to learn Tamil. Through my brief Tamil education in the past and my parents talking to me in Tamil, I was able to understand Tamil, but I could never really speak, read or write. From my Dad’s teaching when I was younger, I knew about the rich literary tradition of my people, and I wanted to be able to understand and share those various ancient texts at the picnic. While translations do exist, I felt like only the original text would be fully able to capture the beauty that I wanted to explore. And so I started the daunting challenge of learning Tamil, something that I had failed at multiple times in the past. I was blessed to go to a university that had some books on learning Tamil in the library, so I started by getting one of those books on Tamil. It was tough work, languages have always been quite difficult for me (Spanish and English were my most difficult classes in high school), but through studying and practice, I was able to gain a basic ability to read and speak. There was unexpected fruit like being able to talk and communicate with my grandmother better, with us being able to understand each other more. I still have far to go to be able to read and understand the complex ancient texts, but I am slowly but surely gaining the ability to do so.
Seeing God's Kingdom in Pongal
At the beginning of the past semester, I realized that the Tamil harvest festival of Pongal was coming up. I remembered that my family had celebrated this when I lived at home by making varieties of the pongal dish. After doing some research, I decided that I wanted to celebrate this festival. I connected with the meaning of Pongal, which means to “to overflow”. I took a bus to get to the nearest Indian store and gathered up the ingredients that would be necessary to make the two varieties of pongal: ven pongal and chakkarai pongal. I then invited a few of my friends and some members of my campus ministry to join me in this celebration. On the Friday night of the festival, we all came together and cooked both dishes, putting my recently developed cooking skills to good use. My friends soon learned about the wondrous and fearful whistling that comes from a pressure cooker and about the various many Indian spices like turmeric and asafoetida. Once the cooking was finished, I shared with them the meaning and purpose of the festival, and we sat down to eat. Through this celebration, I saw a glimpse of the kingdom of God on Earth, a small representation of that picnic, where I was able to share parts of my culture and ethnicity with my fellow friends and siblings in Christ.
It has been quite a journey so far in understanding my identity in Christ, and through that, where my ethnicity and culture fit in. As I grow better at cooking and learn more Tamil, I am growing in my appreciation of the heritage that my ancestors have left for me and my people. I await my next desire from the Holy Spirit in learning about my ethnicity and culture (right now thinking about learning dancing), and I will be ready to pursue it with my whole heart, ready to share whatever it is with the kingdom of God.
I attended a local neighborhood elementary school, where I was one of a handful of Indians. I would bring Indian food that my Mom cooked for lunch, but after hearing kids calling it "messy", I didn't want to bring Indian food anymore. I would only bring a PB&J and goldfish for lunch everyday, fearing the difficulties of not fitting in. I would continue this way until high school, when I became more comfortable with Indian food. I started attending Tamil school during the weekends when I was in elementary school, yet I was one of the few that failed the exams. I was taught that a primary part of my Tamil-ness was through knowing the language, which left me feeling inadequate; as though part of my identity was missing. All of this made me feel I wasn't Indian enough, Tamil enough, that I just didn't fit in.
If you're Asian, you're Smart
For middle and high school, I attended a magnet school. It was around this time that my parents got divorced, and it was quite a rough period for me. I had to live 2 separate split lives between my parents, switching back and forth every few days, and it was just a lot to maintain. If I asked my Dad about why this was happening to me, he would tell me that I was paying for the sins of my previous births, an answer that was quite unsatisfying to me. I slowly lost any faith that I had in the Hindu gods. I also started wishing that I had never been born, that seemed like it would have solved many problems. Through this, I put my hope in time passing and college nearing, that life would get better as soon as I was able to escape from my parents. Losing faith in Hinduism made me feel like I had lost the last part of my Indian and Tamil identity, and so I started looking for other places in which I could find my identity. Academics became a safe haven for me, and I threw myself fully into school. I started associating my identity with my grades and GPA, what I considered to be my intelligence. Through hearing comments like “if you’re Asian, you’re smart”, I felt like “smartness” was the core of who I was.
I'm not Indian, I'm Human
Going into college, I still found my identity in my intelligence. And it was validated during my freshman year. I thought college would be much more difficult than high school, but found myself doing academically well. I joined leadership in engineering clubs and published papers. I was cruising. I felt validated in finding my identity in my intelligence.
During sophomore year, the main thing on my mind, as well as nearly all of my friends' minds, was recruiting - getting an internship for next summer. I started applying to internships, getting referrals, and attending career fairs, sometimes even at other universities, all in a bid to get an internship. Yet, although I was doing the very same things that my friends did with very similar resumes as them, I wasn’t able to get a single interview, while my friends and my fellow teammates in engineering clubs seemed to be getting interviews and offers every other week. I tried reviewing my resume with other people and worked to improve it, but that didn’t seem to help. I learned recruiters preferred juniors over sophomores, and I had enough credits to graduate early, so I changed my graduation date, but that didn’t seem to help either. For months, I tried various recommendations and suggestions but nothing I did seemed to help, and I was just really confused and baffled as to why I couldn’t get an interview.
Now, around the same time as this internship hunt, in the middle of my sophomore year, a friend introduced me to the Asian InterVarsity chapter at my school. I started exploring the Christian faith, through AIV and church, what it means to believe in Christ and just the character of the Christian God. There was something about God being a loving God, that just hooked me, and just made me want to know more. Yet I still didn’t question my beliefs about my identity. I didn’t believe that my Indian or Tamil identity was important, even declaring to my campus minister that “I’m not Indian, I’m human.”
Trapped
And then Covid hit. I was sent home from college to an extended spring break. I had friends lose internships yet find another within a matter of days, leaving me questioning again what was wrong with me. The summer started and I had nothing to do - no job, no school - so I spent my days mostly just thinking, trying to analyze what had gone wrong, what to do next. I was trapped in my house, trapped in my room, and worst of all trapped in my own mind. I felt ashamed that I wasn’t able to live up to expectations from parents, my friends, and just myself. To avoid seeing people, both family as well as friends over zoom, I went nocturnal, sleeping during the day and staying up at night. And even when I did sleep, I just wouldn’t get any rest.
There was this one night, about 3 or 4 months after spring break, during the summer between my sophomore and junior year, I just broke down. Fall recruiting season for the next summer was just about to start, and I wasn’t sure if I would be able to continue living if I went through this rejection again for yet another season. I had put all my hope and faith in college, that things would get better once I got to college, but I found myself again wishing I had not been born, contemplating why I should continue living. I felt so broken, that was the moment I truly surrendered before God. I was just utterly defeated, there was nothing I could do and I couldn’t do it by myself. That is when I truly realized that it was only with God that I could hope to live and dream. God didn’t need to prove himself to me anymore, I just needed God. And I prayed, I didn’t even say or think any words, I just sat there crying and praying with my heart. I went to sleep after that and the next day was the first in a very long time that I actually felt well-rested after I slept.
Nothing really changed the next day or week, and I grew more anxious around finding an internship. After all, what was the point? There was nothing to add to my resume, except changing my graduation date back to normal, so, why would any company change their mind about me? I spent less time applying to far fewer internships than the hundreds I had the year before. Suddenly, I got interview requests from several companies and opportunities started opening up. Recruiters were asking me to do interviews, and many of these turned into offers.
My Cup Overflows
There was a time in small group during my junior year, where I was sharing about another offer I had gotten. We read Psalm 23, where it talks about a God who leads his flock to greener pastures, which God had done for me emotionally. I connected so much to this God who comforts even when we’re walking through the darkest valley, which I felt on that day when I felt the most broken. I connected to this God who provides so much that "my cup overflows"- I saw my cup overflow with offers and interviews. It was during that small group that I realized God's provision, God's faithfulness and God's steadfast love for his people, and for me. And so, I started believing in the Christian God, and after reflecting more on other ways God had acted in my life, I started following Jesus.
What to Bring to the Picnic
As I began following Jesus, I started questioning who I was and what my identity meant. I could no longer derive my identity from this so-called intelligence, having been greatly humbled. Through sermons in church, I was told that my identity should lie solely in Christ, but what did this mean for my ethnicity? I attended an Asian and Asian American ethnic specific ministry, which led me to investigate my ethnicity. But as the only South Asian, I was forced to question for the first time whether I was even Asian. I began investigating the intersection of ethnicity, culture, and faith. My campus minister used the metaphor of a picnic for the kingdom of God. She said one way to view it is like a picnic, where people of all tribes, tongues, nations, of all ethnicities come together to share their food- their culture- with each other. I was quite intrigued by this metaphor, but I questioned what I would bring to this picnic. What would I be able to share about my culture and ethnicity? I didn’t feel very connected to my ethnicity or culture, whether it be my Indian-ness or my Tamil-ness. Yet although I didn’t feel connected, I felt challenged to learn more about my cultural heritage and through that to find things to bring to this picnic as part of my Indian and Tamil identities.
Naturally, the first thing I thought of to bring to this picnic was food. Food felt like the only way I still felt somewhat connected to my Indian identity, as I would eat Indian food everyday. However, I didn’t actually know how to cook Indian food myself, since I would just rely on my Mom’s cooking at home and the Indian place on campus. I felt like if I wanted to bring food to this picnic, I should make it myself, so I was inspired to learn how to cook Indian food. I was home doing a virtual internship between my junior and senior year, so I asked my Mom to teach me the classic Indian recipes. She was quite surprised and suspicious that I was showing interest in something that I had never asked about once before, but she relented and agreed to teach me and translate recipes from Tamil to English. I started out by making a basic recipe everyday. Initially, the numerous spices and dals in my Mom’s cabinets were quite intimidating, but through continuous practice and testing and tweaking of recipes I was able to start making somewhat tasty food. Through this growth in cooking, I am slowly but surely gaining the experience that will allow me to share this part of my culture with the kingdom of God.
At the start of my senior year, I began contemplating the next thing that I would bring to this picnic. I started having this growing desire to learn Tamil. Through my brief Tamil education in the past and my parents talking to me in Tamil, I was able to understand Tamil, but I could never really speak, read or write. From my Dad’s teaching when I was younger, I knew about the rich literary tradition of my people, and I wanted to be able to understand and share those various ancient texts at the picnic. While translations do exist, I felt like only the original text would be fully able to capture the beauty that I wanted to explore. And so I started the daunting challenge of learning Tamil, something that I had failed at multiple times in the past. I was blessed to go to a university that had some books on learning Tamil in the library, so I started by getting one of those books on Tamil. It was tough work, languages have always been quite difficult for me (Spanish and English were my most difficult classes in high school), but through studying and practice, I was able to gain a basic ability to read and speak. There was unexpected fruit like being able to talk and communicate with my grandmother better, with us being able to understand each other more. I still have far to go to be able to read and understand the complex ancient texts, but I am slowly but surely gaining the ability to do so.
Seeing God's Kingdom in Pongal
At the beginning of the past semester, I realized that the Tamil harvest festival of Pongal was coming up. I remembered that my family had celebrated this when I lived at home by making varieties of the pongal dish. After doing some research, I decided that I wanted to celebrate this festival. I connected with the meaning of Pongal, which means to “to overflow”. I took a bus to get to the nearest Indian store and gathered up the ingredients that would be necessary to make the two varieties of pongal: ven pongal and chakkarai pongal. I then invited a few of my friends and some members of my campus ministry to join me in this celebration. On the Friday night of the festival, we all came together and cooked both dishes, putting my recently developed cooking skills to good use. My friends soon learned about the wondrous and fearful whistling that comes from a pressure cooker and about the various many Indian spices like turmeric and asafoetida. Once the cooking was finished, I shared with them the meaning and purpose of the festival, and we sat down to eat. Through this celebration, I saw a glimpse of the kingdom of God on Earth, a small representation of that picnic, where I was able to share parts of my culture and ethnicity with my fellow friends and siblings in Christ.
It has been quite a journey so far in understanding my identity in Christ, and through that, where my ethnicity and culture fit in. As I grow better at cooking and learn more Tamil, I am growing in my appreciation of the heritage that my ancestors have left for me and my people. I await my next desire from the Holy Spirit in learning about my ethnicity and culture (right now thinking about learning dancing), and I will be ready to pursue it with my whole heart, ready to share whatever it is with the kingdom of God.