Namaste Neosporin: Straddling American Culture at School and Indian Culture at Home

“Hey Sid, you’re bleeding.” It was a bit of a shock, to see the gash across the back of my left hand. A trickle of blood seeped out. It didn’t hurt in the slightest and didn’t appear nearly deep enough to be hospital-worthy. After putting on the required safety glasses, I washed off the blood with cold water before walking over to the sink and rubbing the high-strength, industrial soap used by the school’s robotics department over my hands to clear away the advertised 99.9 percent of bacteria. It appeared that I had wounded myself while carrying a heavy and greasy robot undoubtedly filled to the brim with deadly infections.

At home, this would have been a minor inconvenience, something to put a bit of a naturally-derived concoction on. My mother’s go-to medicine for minor cuts to major gashes is a mixture of manuka honey and turmeric. We also insist on storing an Indian Ayurvedic cure-all known as Kailas Jeevan in nearly every room. My mother claims it can cure essentially every ailment known to man and can be both ingested and applied as a cream.

After swiping my hand over the paper towel dispenser sensor for a few seconds, I wiped my hands and was ready to get back to work. Seeing the wound begin to turn red again, I realized I needed to get a band-aid to prevent the blood from getting on the robot — so I slapped one on. But a few minutes later I found that it had inexplicably slipped off.

People began to notice.
“Sid, you need to clean that up properly.”
“Hey Sid, that looks bad. Did you use Neosporin?”
“Sid, take this packet. It has Neosporin in it.”

My home is an extension of my Indian culture, a little slice of India itself. Our meals are always cooked fresh, in keeping with Ayurvedic principles. My dad loves listening to old Bollywood music.

Though I felt a bit irritated at the interruption of my work, I was also intrigued. Neosporin? Taking it, I struggled to rip the ketchup-like packet open. I picked up some scissors and cut the packet, expecting some kind of wet wipe. Instead, a gooey liquid dripped out on my fingers and the scissors, and an acidic chemical scent wafted over me. What? Is it an expired wipe that turned into goo? For a minute, I felt the sting as I applied it to the cut, a stark contrast to the cooling home remedies used by my mother.

I occasionally see the cultural clash between my American culture and Indian culture manifest itself in such little things. Though they’re far and few between, experiences like these make me realize that I’m in some ways so very different from those surrounding me. It’s always the little things, like how it’s traditional in India to call every elder you respect either uncle or auntie, depending on their gender; or the fact that I do a video call with my grandmother every day because my parents told me (in a true Indian fashion) that it’s good karma to bring joy to an old lady who lives to see me.

Looking back, my home is an extension of my Indian culture, a little slice of India itself. Our meals are always cooked fresh, in keeping with Ayurvedic principles. My dad loves listening to old Bollywood music. My parents talk to their parents about life across the Pacific every day. We follow the values of a traditional Indian family right here in modern Silicon Valley. I always feel a shift when I step through the doorway into my house. A shift from the American culture at school to the Indian culture at home. After many years of practice, it’s a seamless transition. I suppose the only extension of this feeling is when my parents and I travel to India during the summer vacation. The Indian culture follows me like a shadow, expanding to an entire subcontinent as I step off the airplane.

Sometimes, the difference between cultures can feel very apparent. I’ll always have that little bit of Indian culture preventing me from being truly American, and the little bit of American culture preventing me from being truly Indian. I think this is something that a lot of people feel to varying degrees. One might feel compelled to pick one culture or the other, especially if they’re very different. However, I think it’s important to remember that you can be a part of both cultures, or both cultures can be a part of you. It’s okay to be a little bit Indian and a little bit American. You don’t have to choose one or the other. I find that I am able to use both cultures to navigate the world around me — the simplest analogy I can find to describe this is that of being bilingual. There is a great benefit to using those multicultural exposures to strengthen my worldview and the depth of my experiences.

“Hey Ma, do you know what Neosporin is?”
“Yes, it’s the American version of Kailas Jeevan.”

---

Siddhant Kanwar is a sophomore at Mountain View High in Mountain View, California. In his free time, Sid likes to play chess and is an active member of his school’s robotics team.