Something Seems Off

After coming back from India, there was definitely a feeling that my home I’ve lived in for years felt different. It felt as though I did not belong or that I needed to readjust into the life I had known for almost my entire life. The strange thing was that a week before I left Hyderabad, I had just felt accustomed to my lifestyle there. I felt that I had just started to become comfortable with how I was living and the environment I was living in. The sudden change into a completely different albeit not new environment was actually quite shocking.

So much of the infrastructure and common societal norms that were obvious in the U.S. were definitely not present in India. For example, when coming back and walking across the street I would always feel as though I didn’t need to wait for the signal to allow me to walk. I instinctively tried to walk across the street ready to dodge oncoming traffic just as I had been doing in India. With this particular difference, I caught on pretty quickly when I realized that the cars here were driving much faster than they were in India and they seemed shocked when I walked when “It wasn’t my turn.”

My biggest takeaway from the trip was a sense of appreciation for where I come from and the luxuries I am afforded simply by being able to live and study where I do. This luxury also encompasses the opportunity to go on trips like this one where I am able to spend time simply immersing myself in a completely new culture and meeting people halfway across the world from where I grew up. Many of the interns I was working with expressed to me that their biggest dream was to travel to the U.S. to either study or work. For me, it really gives me a perspective looking at how people from around the world are working hard to get the opportunity to live and travel outside of their countries. The feeling of being bestowed all these luxuries simply by being born in a certain place seems a little unfair and it really opens my eyes to how appreciative I should be of my living situation.