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On Sunday, Christians around the world celebrated Easter, which marks the day Jesus was believed to have resurrected from the dead. As a Hindu, the festival for me is like any other Christian or Islamic holiday – it comes and goes. But this year things were a little different in my home.
I took my baby daughter to an Easter celebration organized in our community. It was a purely secular gathering with fun activities for kids like egg hunts, decorating Easter baskets, etc. Both of us enjoyed the event, even though she slept most of the time and I had to do all the decorating.
No, I am not trying to turn into a half-baked Christian – one who celebrates all the holidays but has no spiritual interest. I am just embracing multiculturalism.
As an immigrant, it is difficult to raise children who understand and appreciate your heritage as well as the heritage of the adopted homeland. It gets even more complex when the parents’ adopted homeland is the child’s own. How do you then decide which culture is “ours” and which is “theirs”? What is the definition of “our culture”?
The inability of families to properly guide their children in terms of culture, religion and patriotism can be seen across Europe and in some parts of America. Immigrants and their children find themselves locked up in a “ghetto,” where they are isolated from the surrounding community. These “cultural ghettos” are created by the immigrants themselves, who buy into the false idea that “living among our own” will keep the kids grounded and away from “corrupt Western ideas.”
I know a couple of families who, despite living in the United States for decades, speak broken English, have little or no knowledge of the way the country’s government functions and are totally oblivious of their “outsider” neighbors. What is the point of living in the United States if you act as if you are still in your homeland?
The desire to not mix brings isolation. I believe such problems as homegrown terrorism in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Europe could be tackled if the communities and governments would work together to close all the cultural and ethnic ghettos and bring people together.
As an immigrant, I understand the desire to stay close to one’s roots. I too want my daughter to be fluent in my mother tongue, Nepali, to understand and appreciate our colorful holidays and to be a good Hindu. But if I denied her American experiences in an effort to keep her Nepali heritage intact, it would be unfair.
Multiculturalism does not kill one’s culture. Rather, it adds the flavors of your friends’ and neighbors’ cultures to your own. A Hindu does not lose points by having fun at an Easter egg hunt, and a Christian is not penalized for celebrating Holi, the Festival of Colors when Hindus throw colored powder at one another.
The desire to preserve one’s heritage is truly honorable, but in an effort to achieve that dream it makes no sense to live in a bubble. Isolation cannot save a culture, it only suffocates the followers.
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(Bhumika Ghimire is a freelance reporter. Her articles have been published at OhMyNews, NepalNews, Toward Freedom, Telegraph Nepal, Himal South Asian and ACM Ubiquity. She is also a regular contributor to News Front Weekly, in Kathmandu, and Nepal Abroad, in Washington D.C. She can be reached at bhumika_g@yahoo.com. ©Copyright Bhumika Ghimire.)
