Let’s cultivate a Desi community

Growing up, I would have loved to be part of a progressive Desi community – one that was focused on cultivating joy and belonging. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the best experience of what it means to be South Asian in my youth. There were many culture clashes, disappointments, and deep wounds that arose at the time.

Now, as an adult that has been able to work through many of these issues, I’ve been thinking deeply about what it means to be South Asian. As a first-generation immigrant from India who has been in the US since I was six – that perspective may be very different on certain topics compared to someone who arrived from Pakistan a few months ago for graduate school or a professional program or residency to become a doctor or engineer.

There are also lots of shadow sides of South Asian society, culture, religion, economics, politics that we shy away from discussing because it may ruffle some feathers. I know I’ve had to grapple with many of them growing up – everything from “you have too much freedom” to “what boy will want to marry you” and it has taken decades to reshape my own parent’s perspectives on certain topics. It’s a very lonely experience trying to be a bridge between Western culture and South Asian culture – and it’s often difficult to know whether we are always making the right choices in what we defend.

So, I am excited to announce that my friend Manu Multani and I are starting a Rethink Desi community platform. The platform will make space for a decentralized community of contributors to engage in discussions over culture and society, and to collectively run campaigns, do art projects, book/poetry clubs, and any other collaborations we want to build community. We are partnering with Curry Changemakers, a facebook group with over a thousand subscribers, to create space for informal discussion. We will also take and compile resources from those discussions onto the website – so that more of the South Asian community can be exposed to these resources. We ultimately hope to use some of the content this community shares to create more YouTube videos that will spotlight the topics we are most passionate about.

So, why might you consider joining?

This is a headless movement. We want to provide an organic space for collaboration and creation. We hope this space sparks new ideas, new friendships, and new visions of what it means to be South Asian.

As a former community organizer – I am excited to host zoom calls to facilitate some grounded and thought-provoking discussions that lean into our discomfort around mental health, sexuality, gender discrimination, caste, and more. We hope this will be a space that really engages folks’ hearts and minds and helps provide each of us with fresh new perspectives on what it means to be Desi.

If you are interested in joining, please fill out our short survey. Your responses will help us to capture the resources that have been most useful and impactful in shaping the South Asian lens abroad. We will then clarify, organize, reflect, and engage with this material through Curry Changemakers and Rethink Desi.

We hope to see you there!

Warm wishes,

Arpita