A Journey Through South Asia
Feb 13, 2019 — April 20, 2019
Dad and I left on this crazy adventure in the middle of February 2019 till the end of April, traveling through India, Sri Lanka and Pakistan — meeting people across the social spectrum: old friends, new friends, family, business connections, drivers, guides and cooks. Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Buddhists, conservatives, liberals, and moderates. It was an opportunity of a lifetime, as I continue my quest to explore the world and my place in it.
It’s been a daunting task to summarize the two months of action packed days back to back into a single unified experience. Each day was filled with experiences that are worthy of blog posts by themselves — (stay tuned). Still, it didn’t feel right not to recap this entire trip in some way. What follows is my attempt to share my journey, aided in large part by the journals I keep religiously.
I’ve stayed far away from the “first we went here, and then we went there” sort of narrative. If you want a tldr summary of the trip (where I visited, what I ate, etc.), scroll a bit. If you’re brave enough to read about my reflections, vulnerabilities, learnings, and my roller coaster of emotions, the good the bad and the beautiful of South Asia… keep scrolling!
An Intention for the Reader
I want to be clear about WHY I’m writing and publishing this piece online. It’s firstly a way for me to capture my thoughts on my two month journey away from home in an organized way. Second, I want to share slivers of my experience with you to provoke your thoughts, and give you a glance at what I’ve seen and heard in the past 9 weeks.
Maybe we’ll have some cool conversations around it.
Home is a mind-place
I journaled about my identity regularly as I traversed the subcontinent.
Before this trip, as some of my friends and confidants will know, I was looking for what “home” was to me. Having grown up outside of Boston for the majority of my life, I have a special place in my heart for that part of the world. Home is tied to identity. And identity is tied to a whole bunch of things.
Throughout this trip, I had the chance to explore my Muslim-Indian-Gujarati-American identity from completely different angles.
Early on in my trip, I realized that my language, interests, political philosophy, and the way I look at other human beings was tinted with red, white and blue. While my American-ness would arise during discussions about politics and global issues, I also felt a deep rooted connection to the desi side of my identity. From habits to subtle cultural cues, I was in tune and in love with my South Asian culture, and was glad to be steeped in it thoroughly.
I came across these realizations and didn’t judge them. They were purely learnings. My American-ness, for instance, is neither good nor bad. It just is. In certain moments, I wished I was less American. I wished I had grown up learning Hindi, Urdu and Gujarati, so that I could connect with the people who shared my blood and ancestry. It pained me that I could understand the languages but wasn’t able to speak them at a level that I would have liked. Sometimes, the language barrier made me feel that people didn’t know me.
In other situations, I was glad for my American values and my ability to see things from a uniquely global viewpoint. As an American, I was put into South Asia with a totally different perspective from a local. That made me (and Dad) more adventurous, and more likely to have innovative ideas, differentiating ourselves from the “regular way” that people lived. We understand the pros and cons of east and west, and while South Asians tend to fantasize America, we know where its strengths and its shortcomings are.
Your identity isn’t a finite thing — although that’s how our fragile brains attempt to process it. It’s very easy for us to put things into categories, including ourselves. We, like the world around us, are constantly in motion, changing, learning and growing with time.
Ultimately, I validated the idea that home isn’t tied to a particular location. Home is a state of mind. It’s where I’m surrounded by people who know me from every angle: the goofy me, the ambitious me, the reflective me. The people make the place. I found lots of homes on my journey. And now that it’s over, I find myself sitting in one now.
A specific piece of ground doesn’t influence our experiences as much as the people that occupy that space. When I think back to college, I don’t see the campus, I see my friends — the family that grew with me for years. The campus was but a box, holding all of it together.
Continents can be that too. Just boxes. It’s the people who really matter.
Self-awareness ➡ Universe-awareness
One of the most profound parts of my trip was my interaction with faith. I felt myself get deeper and more thoughtful about my relationship to God. This was in large part through the books I read and from my grandparents, who are my spiritual guides.
It was timely that during this trip I decided to read a book called “Holistic Islam,” which I first discovered in a bookstore in Brooklyn, during my stay there September 2018. That book describes the kind of progressive Islam that I believe in. If you’re curious to find out what that looks like, I’d highly recommend the read.
My biggest breakthrough was in realizing that through self-awareness, we can reach God. I knew that through better knowledge of ourselves, we have better ability to connect with others authentically. However, I learned that meaning in life doesn’t stop at connecting with other people. Through self-knowledge, letting go of ego, exploration of our connections with others, and guidance, we get closer and closer to the Divine.
At the center of my faith is love. Love for the Creator, love for all creation, and love for the interconnectedness of everything in the universe that binds us together.
“The heart is not merely a metaphor for an undefined capacity for feeling. The heart is an objective, cognitive power beyond intellect. It is the organ of perception which can know the world of spiritual qualities. It is the heart that can love, that can praise, that can forgive, that can perceive the Divine Majesty. Only the human heart can say yes, can affirm wholeness, can know the Infinite.”
~ Kabir Heminski, Holistic Islam
Simultaneously, I learned that on the sensitive topic of religion, not everyone is on the same page.
In South Asia, people wear religion on their sleeves. This is weird for me, because in the US, no one can tell what someone believes in by looking at them. In South Asia, people are not only identified by their beliefs, they are judged by them. As a result, they have strong religious communities. That’s a good thing in some cases. People don’t experience loneliness the same way they do in the West.
In Sri Lanka, I saw people of all different faiths: Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, all living side by side in harmony. It was a great break from the divisiveness felt in other parts of the world. My heart hurts for the people of Sri Lanka in light of the terrorist attacks against Christians, and my prayers are with them. It breaks me that hatred and polarization is being spread to the most beautiful and peaceful places on our Earth, places like Sri Lanka and New Zealand…
It’s easy to be a hater…
Nothing makes me sadder than the enmity Indians and Pakistanis feel for each other. Having the unique opportunity to visit both, I saw how similar people are in both countries. There is so much overlap. I also saw how India and Pakistani media perceived the other. Let’s just say that the US isn’t the only place inflicted by the scourge of echo chambers and hateful rhetoric.
Being in both places while tensions in Kashmir escalated rapidly, I saw the epitome of their aggression. What I found was that the vitriol from certain groups was greater in India, with a looming election that can decide the direction of the world’s most populous democracy. In Pakistan, people are understandably defensive of their country versus India, but there, it’s clearly more defensive. People in Pakistan had less of an issue with us being Indians than Indians had with us traveling to Pakistan. Still, for the average person, it doesn’t matter much. As usual, the voices on the fringe speak most loudly and harshly.
If I learned nothing else this trip, it’s that South Asia is truly a singular cultural zone with lots of beautiful subcultures embedded inside it. Seriously, what is everyone fighting about?
I, like the subcontinent itself, am in a weirdly complicated identity situation. I’m an American with Indian ancestry, and Indian grandparents who live in and love Pakistan. Me? I love all three countries that I’m connected to. It pains me so greatly when the hate of extremes on both sides infects the mainstream, splitting families, inciting violence, and ripping people apart — whether it’s in Kashmir, Uttar Pradesh, Balochistan, or Sri Lanka, people are being murdered by senseless violence based on labels.
I feel so strongly about this, and although I kept my feelings about it bottled up for most of the trip, I physically felt upset when I heard about violence happening, lives being lost and fingers starting to point to the other side.
Why do we have to pick sides? We can all be on the same side, humanity’s side. But call that millennial idealism.
Flexibility Kills Fear
On a lighter note, one thing that I knew about the subcontinent before but has now been cemented in my mind is that people in South Asia are super scrappy and enterprising. They make ANYTHING work. With very little material, they’re able to create something useful. Nothing, nothing, nothing goes to waste, and I love that. There can be a use for anything, even if it wasn’t particularly meant for that purpose.
That enterprising nature inspires me. It’s encouraging to see people make things work for them, and it also motivates me to be more scrappy in my own life. Things don’t need to be labelled a certain way for us to use them, as long as we’re knowledgeable and creative enough to make it work.
Yet, there’s a downside to all this scrappiness. It’s precisely because of this behavior that mediocrity is tolerated in the subcontinent. “We’ll make it work,” is a common mindset. Therefore, things aren’t always comfortable.
The lack of creature comforts was a lesson in and of itself. Having to adjust to lots of different scenarios, lifestyles and households, I’ve gotten a unique look at how life is lived by groups across the socio-economic spectrum, from little villages, to small cities, to sprawling metropolises.
Adjusting to new people, places, foods, planes, trains, and situations has basically vanquished any fears I’ve had of surviving in life.
As I step into a new phase, I’m not as scared or apprehensive as I was before this trip. Nothing has changed financially or physically for me since I left. What has changed is my confidence to deal with adversity. The fear has all but evaporated from me, because I’m secure in my ability to deal with challenges that come out of nowhere, and I trust my resilience to get me through the tough days.
Doing Biz
The entrepreneurial fire that burns in any human being is a flame made of the same fiber, no matter where you are in the world. After meeting with family running their own businesses in India, Airbnb entrepreneurs in Sri Lanka, and a bunch of entrepreneurs in Pakistan through Glucose Trail work, I can say that entrepreneurs everywhere have that same beautiful connecting energy.
Most of my time this trip has been spent working on Glucose Trail stuff. We’re empowering communities to take care of themselves through the treatment of their diabetes. This trip was pivotal in setting new initiatives into motion, and in solidifying our intention to not be fancy foreigners giving a handout to needy people, but mere facilitators, helping communities stand on their own feet.
We’re seeding new pods of patients in new locations, pivoting to a social entrepreneurship model, expanding our current reach of patients, rewriting our app from the ground up, and raising funds to help with scaling.
Work mode was different in South Asia. Never has it been more obvious that my comfort zone for business is in the US. Dad carried the torch here, leading meetings, and I was there as a sponge, soaking it up and adding to the conversation whenever it turned towards software or ideas for empowering the community.
Dealing with Lack of Control
One of the biggest challenges I faced during this journey was not having the level of control I’ve been accustomed to having. In South Asia, I have way less mobility than I do in the US. As the schedule for the trip was crafted, I was but a follower (and being the youngest one involved, had little influence with which to move things along).
For many of these situations, I felt sidelined. I wanted to go out, walk around, explore, meet new people. But that kind of random exploration is tough in India and Pakistan when you have a set agenda and don’t know where to go.
This lack of mobility was the hardest thing for me to feel comfortable about — especially since I’m so used to striking out on my own in cities across the US.
This made me particularly homesick. Still, I was able to develop a few strategies to deal with the homesickness, ones I’m planning to share with you soon.
I think this excerpt from my journal accurately conveys how I felt throughout my trip. I wrote this on the fourth day of my trip, while I was in India.
“When life as an experiences changes so drastically in such a short time, it feels natural to rethink the order of things. It’s one of those situations where I’m okay in the moments, the small times… but in reflection, I realize how much information I’m gleaning, not just about South Asia and my roots, but also about myself.”
Takeaways
Being in South Asia is a lesson in prioritizing the problems in life. As a product manager, entrepreneur, and a general problem solver, I look at every problem as an opportunity to do good. There are lots of opportunities in this part of world, and the problems people face here puts the importance of other solutions into perspective.
This post isn’t nearly enough to capture all of the emotions, the learnings, and the experiences I had, but it’s an attempt at summary. I’m sure that there’s so much that I haven’t digested yet, haven’t been able to form into words. Such is the nature of a life filled with newness every day.
When one adventure wraps up, there’s another door to be opened, another opportunity to be sought, and another chapter to be written. We’ll see where the next one takes us.
