May 26th was the best day of my life—with no second even close. On that day my daughter Kimaya was born and I feel like a new person ever since. The curious thing about being a new parent is that the emotions are cliché but deep, predictable yet stupendous, boring to others but just amazing to me. I bet that each of you parents felt the same way when your first child was born.

And like all of you, I think about the future of my child. Will Kimaya be a neurosurgeon or an actress? Will she be a political activist, a social worker, or a professor? Will she be a novelist or a poet? Will she discover a new element, drive a race car, or be an architect?

More importantly, what sort of person will she be? Will she be a loving, empathetic, and kind person? Will she fight for the rights of others? Will she live by her conscience? Will she spread happiness in her future like she does with such amazing success in her present?

Yes, these are lofty questions and yes, they are unanswerable.For she will grow up to be who she wants to be and all I can do is to influence her here and there and try my best to expose her to the enactment of values I hold dear. But starting points and ending points have a way of scarcely resembling each other—so only time will tell.

Now, what I certainly do not want of Kimaya is that she becomes a carbon copy of me; I want her to be as irreverent as she can be, even as it extends to what I teach her, what I ask of her, and how she looks upon me. I hope ultimately to raise a skeptic, a girl (and then woman) who does not accept my—or anyone else’s—assumptions and who questions everything relentlessly.

To me that is what being a good parent is.
That is where I diverge from many of my Indian-American friends and associates. It is clearly unfair to tar a whole community with the same brush—and I am sure there are countless Indian-American far more enlightened than I—but I maintain my view that on this matter, our community is by and large conservative.

Very few Indian-American parents I know want their children to be their own people, to question their parents at every turn, and to reject blind adherence to traditions.

And the subject on which I have the most contention is the notion of whether, as I was asked by someone recently, we plan to raise Kimaya in the “Indian culture.” My answer is that I have no idea what this question even means; here’s why:

Indian culture is not monolithic nor is it always good. What specific cultural forms constitute “Indian culture?” Is it the culture of a middle-class Amritsari Sikh family? Is it the culture of a well-to-do Tamil Brahmin family involved in academics? Is it the culture of an Adivasi in Madhya Pradesh? Is it the culture of a Muslim cobbler in Uttar Pradesh? Is it the culture of a Parsi film-maker in Bombay?

Or perhaps it is the culture of the mobs that killed Muslim children in Gujarat under the gleaming eye of Narendra Modi’s government? Or maybe the culture of the union ministers who conspired in the murder of 3000 Sikhs in New Delhi 20 years ago? Or maybe the culture of the Ranbir Sena in Bihar whose members like to kill hapless peasants? Or that of the Islamic fundamentalists who attacked the Parliament? Of the countless men of all religions who abuse their wives?

The notion of one “Indian culture” that is easily definable is ridiculous and essentialist. And when we define one set of practices as “Indian culture” then we imply that anything else is not “Indian,” thereby negating the complexity of “Indian-ness” and reducing it to a set of biased and rigid ideas. Not to mention that once you decide to go past the boundary that separates everything else from that which is “Indian,” then you’d better be ready to accept all of the bad that we think and do.

Why is it either/or? Okay okay! Let’s assume that there is something called “Indian culture.” Even then, why should I decide to take this set of principles and make it the complete set of inputs and experience that define my child’s personality and outlook? Would it not be a far better idea to let her sift through her experiences and organically develop a personality and a moral framework of her own, irrespective of the labels we put on ways of thinking? Fixity by definition is inimical to progressive growth.

The hypocrisy of the question. I have always found it amazing that NRI’s lament the “loss of Indian culture” or the “lack of transmission of Indian values” in their progeny (those of us called ABCD’s.) Let’s be clear: there is one place where there would have been no loss of “Indian culture” and where transmission would have been complete: India.

But first generation NRI’s left India in pursuit of wealth and opportunity so clearly THEY don’t value “Indian culture” too much. It’s pure hypocrisy to bemoan the “waywardness” of others when one, oneself, rejected the “source of the culture.” Unless of course the intended lesson is that money and big houses are the only things more important than our great culture.

There are many wonderful cultural attributes that are common to many Indians and I readily embrace them; this is not a diatribe against all things Indian. I consider myself heir to much of the “experience of India.”

Much of the good that has planted itself in me (and perhaps some of the bad) came from Indians. And much of both has come from elsewhere. That is my point really: that ultimately each of us must be lead by our morals and these morals must be far more universal than anything which could be identified with in the contours of one and only one culture.

I hope Kimaya finds her own place in the world when she is old enough to start her intellectual life.

I hope that place is a vantage point from which the whole world can be brought into focus. The whole world.