Onam

India is widely known for it's most popular religion, Hinduism. I am from the southern state of Kerala, where there are plenty of Christians. Because many of us are Christian, we don't really get to partake in Indian festivals because they praise Hindu Gods. My family and I are Christian so we don't usually take part in many Indian holidays. But there is one holiday, and it comes specifically from Kerala. It's called Onam, the harvest festival and also the homecoming of a king. The king was said to be residing in the underworld but was very by loved the people of Kerala. He would come back once a year and the people of Kerala would celebrate by showing him all the things that they've grown. We make designs from flower petals and also have a vegetarian dish on banana leaves. It's kind of like the Thanksgiving of Kerala.


Onam is celebrated for ten days with feasts, dances and boat races. During this time, people usually wear the traditional clothing of Kerala which are outfits of white and gold. We celebrated this festival at my church. Almost everybody was dressed in our traditional clothes, so it looked like the whole church was matching. We even had the flower design outside (which was hard to get people NOT to step on!) and we even had lunch on banana leaves. This is definitely one of my favorite Indian holidays because it allows us to celebrate our culture. It's definitely a lot harder to celebrate this holiday in America, because we can't do all the festivities that take place in India. But we do try to do as much as we can. My family even had a little Onam get-together at my cousin's house. This was our first time doing it, and our parents were so happy to see their children learning about our culture. I'm sure it's very difficult for our parents to instill the Indian culture and values in their children, especially with the influences of America and even school. My parents, aunts and uncles all came to America in the 80's and 90's. We do visit India every once in awhile, but tickets are really pricy, especially during summer vacation when the children can actually go. When we do visit India, we go for about 3 weeks because it wouldn't be worth it to go for any less. I think celebrating Onam gives the parents of my family a little sense of nostalgia. I'm sure it brings back their memories of celebrating this holiday in India with their friends and loved ones. I'm glad we can bring at least a little bit of our culture with celebrating Onam in America.

Miss America 2014

As many of you might have seen, Nina Davuluri, an American born and raised Indian woman from New York, was crowned Miss America 2014. Of course, a lot of the second most populated country (India) was ecstatic! I was most definitely included in that group. I was personally really excited because she was even from the South of India, just like I am. My excitement soon started decreasing when I read some nasty tweets on twitter about her almost immediately after the competition ended.

 

 

Reading those tweets made me really upset and I realized how ignorant people still were in this country. I couldn't believe what I was reading. With America being nicknamed "The Melting Pot", I would think it would be normal for a non-Caucasian to win this competition. But it clearly blew minds that a brown woman could win. It's not even like there has never been a colored woman chosen, it was just that she seemed like so many stereotypes to uneducated people. There were comments saying she was Native American, which by the way is nothing close to being from the country of India, not that it even matters. There were tweets about how she could be Arab or Muslim and maybe even in the Al Qaeda. I even read a few tweets that Donald Trump should ask her for her birth certificate because people really didn't believe that Nina Davuluri could possibly actually be from the United States of America. I was so surprised to see the harsh comments people had to make.

 

Honestly, it was really upsetting to see people tweeting like this. It is pretty ridiculous how uneducated some people can be and have the nerve to tweet words so harsh to one of their own, in a country of "equality". I picked India as the topic for this blog to teach people about India and I figured I should definitely add something about Miss America 2014 because there was so many racist things being said about a fellow Indian. I just want to point out to these idiots that it doesn't matter what color you are. As long as she is Indian I don't understand why people have such a problem with it. These rude tweets have definitely brought many Indians together and gave Nina Davuluri much support. I don't get why people did say these things, considering this country is mainly made up of immigrants from all over the world. I'm sure the people that made these comments have ancestors that are immigrants and don't even realize. I just wanted to give attention to the racist comments that were being said, because it's really unfair, no matter what country Miss America could have been from. Apparently, this was a serious controversial issue. That really made me laugh. There was an issue about Miss America not being white? Really. There are so many articles about this topic and I've even seen it on the news. Isn't there bigger and worse things happening in the world than a brown woman being crowned Miss America? I think all people really need to do is educate themselves. Or pay attention in school. You'll know the difference between cultures and nationalities before putting comments up on social networks for the world to see.