Veeksha's Vibes

     India is home to a lot of weird food customs. I was really excited to visit and spend some time with my extended family I rarely get to see, but I was almost spending more time consuming fruit and fruit derived product. If at any time you go to a household in India, they will offer you either juice, tea, or fresh mango, and in the unfortunate situation that you refuse all, they may resort to forcing some food down your throat against your will. This culture was more prominent back when my dad was a kid, he consistently tells stories of going to his aunt’s house to just talk to his cousin for a few minutes and come back, but he wasn’t allowed to leave until he had a full meal (no matter what he had eaten before).      In my eyes that was just pure torture, but this practice is very understandable if we travel back in time. My great aunt, (the aunt that forced my dad to eat) and probably her ancestors, were told to always offer food to a guest. Not only ...

     This one is a ritual of amusement, unlike the others that take up only a few minutes of the day, this one can take hours together. The people would sit in front of magic windows that would glow in different patterns to make pictures of something else. It was almost like a drawing that could move. When the first magic window was made, it only showed things in black and white, later as the people's tools got more advanced, they could make windows that showed color. Only the nobles of the village could purchase these at first but as they became more common and affordable, more people were willing to waste their lives staring into them. Through this, many stories would be told that sometimes changed the way the people saw their world.  Sometimes these stories would be more educational than what they learned in their schools. They would also be more enjoyable too because hundreds of them would be made every year and the people would have a variety to choose from. Thr...

Firoozeh Dumas goes through the hardship she experienced when she was a new immigrant through her name. I can relate to this not because of my name but because of my accent.  Lets face it, my accent was the most cringe in the whole class. There were others with accents but they weren't nearly as bad as mine. I moved to Troy when I was 5 (still developing language and speech). Learning English during this time was especially as hard because of that, and I would refrain form socializing or playing with other kids because it all involved speaking English, something I wasn't good at yet.  I could start to tell that people didn't like spending time with me because of my accent in 2nd grade. There were a few other Indians in my class, most of them wore the same clothes and had the same backpack aesthetic as me. Everything was the same except the accent. This drove my confidence and morale down by a lot. I would play on the swings and monkey bars by myself most of the time. In thi...