My family and I boarded the airplane to find that they rearranged our seat numbers.
Not all of us were sitting together, so we asked those around us if they would swap seats with us. While all of them politely denied our requests, I happened to overhear the conversation between an Indian woman we had asked and her husband.
"These young ABCD girls asked me to switch seats with them and I was like ummmm...no thanks!"
We had done nothing other than asked her to switch seats with us, yet she stereotyped us as ABCD's. ABCD stands for American-Born Confused Desi, which is essentially a person of Indian descent born in the United States who is out of touch with the Indian culture.
Yes, we are American-born. Yes, we are Desi. But where can she make the assumption about the "confused" part? Just because we had American accents, she assumed we knew nothing about our culture.
Little did she know that all of us are heavily involved in various forms of classical and modern Indian dance. We all speak fluent Hindi and can even read and write some. We watch Bollywood movies almost as much as we watch Hollywood movies. We play Indian singing games, and our parents teach us everything there is to know about our background.
We embrace our culture, and our birth in the United States has no impact on how much we value and cherish where our families come from.
