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Dear incredible Duke: It’s been quite the ride. We’ve had our ups. We’ve had our downs. It would be an understatement to say that I’m a different person now than I was four years ago when I first walked into Randolph. That fresh-out-of-high-school girl was riding the fresh-out-of-high-school wave. I came to Duke with all the false confidence brought about by being “good at things” in high school. But Duke was different.
People are often surprised when they see I have a tattoo. The follow up question after being told it’s real is almost always, “What is it?” I usually just say that it’s "aum" (?), the sound from yoga—a symbol of Hinduism. But every time I say that, I’m doing a disservice to myself. Yes, it is the sound often made in yoga. But that’s not the reason I got it—my experience with yoga is limited to the gym class I took last semester, where I took full advantage of the six classes I could miss. Yes, it is a symbol of Hinduism, and while that is my religion, that’s not why I got it. Today, in honor of Genocide Awareness Month, I want to share with you the story of why I got my tattoo.
It’s no secret that my favorite thing about Duke is the incredible research culture. We are lucky enough to have some of the most brilliant minds in the academic world walking through the same gothic wonderland as the rest of us, and the things those minds produce leave me speechless on a daily basis. They inspire me, and to be perfectly honest, they scare me a little too. When I think about how the world is about to enter a new age, I get visibly flustered. I’ll let you decide if that’s pathetic or not, but nevertheless, I hope you hear me out. At the end of this article, if you are not at least a little wonderstruck, I will happily buy you a cup of coffee to make up for your time.
I remember the day I realized I wanted to be an engineer. I was so disappointed in myself. After spending years trying to fight it, I had somehow tumbled into the biggest of Indian stereotypes. As someone who is exceedingly predictable and hates that about myself, I would daydream about the look on the faces of my more traditional family members when I would tell them that I was studying Art or English. Alas, somewhere along the way, I was caught in the STEM trap, and it’s a hard one to shake yourself lose from. The day I realized I wanted to be an engineer, a new part of me budded into life. And a few other parts started to wither away.
I’ve become pretty jaded by the world lately. Too many late night life conversations about wars and genocide and planes crashing have made me wish I was an aerospace engineer, so I could help put colonies on the moon to escape. Instead, I just walk around, studying my surroundings through whatever the opposite of rose-colored glasses are, my inner cynic out in full force. In these times, sometimes it’s hard to remember that there’s still good for the sake of good.
Six years, one week, and one day ago, I watched my house burn down. Six years, one week, and one day later, I can still close my eyes and relive the entire night. Being in the car with my mom and pulling over four times to let fire trucks pass. The growing knot in my throat that made it hard to swallow when I realized they were going the same way we were. The surrealism of turning the corner on to our street, knowing, just knowing, it was our house, but still having to see it to believe it. My sister, barefoot in the snow, talking to the firefighters because that was the night we found out how amazing she is in a crisis. Seeing my dad cry for the first time ever as he watched everything he had worked so long and hard for since coming to this country go up in smoke.
From the very first day of O-Week freshman year, I have identified as an engineer. But that didn’t stop me from doing a double take the first time I walked into EGR53. That’s not an exaggeration—I walked in, walked out, rechecked my nicely printed out schedule and walked back in. I was convinced that I was in the wrong room. Why? Everyone looked so… Normal. This reaction was especially rash when you consider that if you look up the definition of "engineer", you’re not exactly going to get “5’2, extremely loud Indian girl who always wears dresses and laughs too much”. I realized that I didn’t really know what the "engineer" stereotype involved. Who really fits into it?
