the warmth of India

I contemplate, with grave seriousness, how to protect the Indian paradigm

Photo of me dancing, captured by a friend (March 2025)

How do you fill your cup? In America we have certain ideas around how to do so. A massage or a run, alone. We fill our cups with solo time because other people, well, other people are hellish.

In India and in Indian culture, if I may briefly refer to it as that, other people are both our Hell and our salvation. In a country of 1.4 billion there is no escape, but my guess is the South Asian region, an agricultural society, has been this way for a long time. One could be estranged from their family, but even then there is always someone in the family waiting for a lost sheep to come home. There is someone who wants the lost sheep to visit again. To eat with them. To see family for the sake of seeing. Not with the hope of a deep, connective conversation or even the expectation of much conversation at all — they just want to be in the company of family and they will wait for as long as it takes.

Whether its nuclear family, extended family, or quite distant family, you will always be mané avaru or “people of our home”. You will always belong to namma bashe or “our language”. This unconditional interest in the other emanates beyond the Indian household. In South India, or perhaps more specifically in my homestate of Karnataka, people are delighted to interact with one another.

You might ask — Aishwarya, are you not wearing rose-colored glasses? Are you not a visibly upper-caste and attractive young woman? Might they treat others differently?

This is possible but through silent observations I feel there is a default enjoyment of human company that is missing in American culture. It exists here to an extent, moreso in small towns like parts of Oregon where I grew up or Birmingham, Alabama a place that has captured my heart, but the American approach to social interaction, while warmer than some cultures, falls short of what we are capable of. India, and Indians, demonstrate a new paradigm of what is culturally possible.

It is this warmth that I miss when I am back in America. The South Indian weather hugs me and hydrates my skin and hair, but it’s Indian hospitality that quenches a molecular thirst. Part of the warmth is also in the language.

Speaking Kannada adds a layer of familiarity. Kannada is a language I almost exclusively speak with my family so I experience an even greater feeling of intimacy when I speak it. I could be speaking with a taxi driver or a neighbor — Kannada creates a feeling of ease between us, like two sticks rubbing into a flame.

every man is my brother

One humid afternoon in Udupi, at my grandparents home while we all — aunts, uncles, cousins, and babies — sauntered about the house completing different tasks, we also welcomed two groups of visitors. The first was my mother’s cousin’s best friend. We refer to him as anna, or “brother”, and he has been a lifelong anna to each of us. A man of all trades, he is often my second call when I need a favor.

This anna came over and stayed for nearly three hours. We sat and chatted. First it was him, myself, my sister, and my brother-in-law. Then it was him, myself, my mom, and my cousin. Then it was him and my two aunts. Like this we cycled through various permutations, each chatting more leisurely than the last. The conversation had no rigorous purpose or agenda. It was simply people enjoying each other’s company to no particular end.

After our anna left, another anna stopped by with his wife and child. They too stayed for several hours. These extended visits are possible only if all parties are willing to make themselves available.

an endangered paradigm

What is so special about people sitting around and talking? It could be that I live in San Francisco, a place to build careers, not necessarily communities, or that most of my social circle attended Stanford, an institution that churns out high-achievers with little free time, but the slow and community-oriented paradigm of small town India feels, to me, quite radical and precious.

I contemplate, with grave seriousness, how to protect that paradigm. The San Francisco-Stanford hustle culture can, like a disease, spread across the world. It lures young people from villages, towns, and small cities into its web of lies, promising some kind of unknowable satisfaction. The chance to be so-called successful, and in their pursuit of that success, these people shed an endangered way of life. They begin to optimize, not just their body or learning habits, but time itself. The hustle leads to a life of alienation from others and self because there is no short cut to building a community. It demands a precious resource which young professionals are unwilling to relinquish.

One last word on my friends from America who attended the wedding; indeed it was gratifying that they witness and celebrate the union of two families, but it was the fact that they gained context for a place, a people, and a culture, also known as Bharatiya samskara, that forever changed my relation to them. I am glad to be married, but the joy I feel returning to an American community that now understands the Indian paradigm, even if just a sliver of it, is unmatched. I return having sipped from the elixir of life.