It's hard to think of myself as an American, and yet I am not from India, a place where I was not born and where I have never lived.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I feel partly American, but I have an ambiguous relation with both America and India, the only two countries I really know. I never feel fully one way or the other.
As a child, I felt that the Indian part of me was unacknowledged, and therefore somehow negated, by my American environment and vice versa. Growing up, I was impatient with my parents for being so different, holding on to India the way they did, and always making me feel like I had to make a choice of which way I would go.
I'm different. I don't speak perfect American. I do have a lilt of an Indian accent. I thought, 'Maybe the world's not okay with what I bring, being Indian.'
People are always asking me where I come from, and they're expecting me to say India, and they're absolutely right insofar as 100 percent of my blood and ancestry does come from India. Except, I've never lived one day of my life there. I can't speak even one word of its more than 22,000 dialects.
I think of myself as a plain human being who happens to be an American.
I was born in the U.S. This is my country.
I always see America as really belonging to the Native Americans. Even though I'm American, I still feel like a visitor in my own country.
It's very important to me that people see I am an American and I was born in the States.
Growing up in the States, there's this part of me that's like, man, I'm Indian. Like, this is where I belong. And as soon as I got to India, and I had to go to the bathroom in some places, I was, like, 'Man - I am American.'
I was born in India - but never really lived there.