Dear Prea,
Greetings from Doha! As this eventful semester comes to a close and we start on our winter travels to Bali and India, I want to write to you because I have so many thoughts to share with you, and I haven’t written to you in a while. I’ve been thinking a lot about community lately, as you know, so I thought I’d organize my thoughts here and we could think through them together. The reason I want to think about this is because I know community today will not look like it did when we were kids, and as we are preparing to bring a new life into the world, I thought together we could envision the way community can look for them.
So, what is community? This is not intended to be a philosophical letter, so I’m not going to offer a technical definition of community. I want to get into the practicalities of it. But we have to investigate what the essence of community is if we want to intentionally develop it for the future. From what I understand, community is about people, and particularly people who share a narrative about who they are. This could be as broad as “the Indian community” or as small as “our neighborhood community”. We can have an identity that is rooted in a place, time, race, religion, gender, politics, etc. All of these are communities we belong to. You and I belong to a community just in ourselves too — The only people who share in the identity of the “Varun-Prea relationship” are me and you! A community seems to have a shared story and shared interests.
These shared interests and stories are what give a person who belongs to them, I think, a feeling of belonging, solidarity, and expansion. When we feel like a part of something bigger than ourselves, it is uplifting! Cultivating the experience of community then seems to be an important aspect of personal development for any human being, let alone a new one on the way. And there are many ways to cultivate that community experience, I think. It could be something as basic as, Do we share a physical characteristic? A nationality? A race? A gender? A religion? A similar age? Neighborhood? School? Education level? Sports teams and interests? Hobbies? It gets more complicated when we say, Do we share similar cultural knowledge? Our class? Our family history? Roots? And even more complicated when we ask, Do we share an ideology? A knowledge base? A political commitment? Values?
And what communities are we part of?
We belong to so many communities, big and small — we are both of Indian origin, and while I belong to the community of second-generation Indian-Americans, you belong to the Indo-Caribbean community (or, more broadly, the Caribbean community): these have some shared and some different characteristics, but as we have witnessed, there is clearly overlap. We are both millennials in our 30s. We are both American citizens. We live in a really nice neighborhood. We both share graduate education level, our careers, and fortunately our subject areas also overlap greatly, thus we also share academic commitments, conferences, friends, etc. I would say our values are completely aligned (luckily!), along with our resulting political commitments to actively engage in the struggles against power and to introduce a politics of kindness in our classrooms and beyond. We belong to the Swarthmore community as well.
There are so many people involved in the creation of all of these communities. We have (big) families, our neighborhood is filled with nice people, our college life includes a cultivated and growing network of students and faculty, our list of more long-distance academic friends from conferences and other networks is also steadily growing, we have our closest allies from our respective grad schools, and our political work is leading us to connect with people involved in the struggles we are committed to as well. Am I missing something?
There are communities we don’t want to be part of, too: my caste community, for example, is not something I support as an independent community. Since I come from a dominant-caste background, claiming allegiance to my caste is another way of supporting the structures of power that privilege me and my caste and deprive so many millions of others of basic human rights. But I can’t avoid the fact that I belong to that community, so what can I do? My best option, as I understand it, is to spend time unlearning and then teaching others to unlearn that allegiance. We may learn from Dalit visionaries like Babasaheb Ambedkar to critique it fully such that we understand that there is no value, no merit, finally, in propagating the caste system. I have done this to the best of my ability through my Caste and Power course. I would say it was a great success. Now, it is a matter of foregrounding that knowledge in the creation of the layers of communities we want to be part of.
Now, having identified all of that, which of these communities can we choose to prioritize and expand upon? Which communities would we like our child to be exposed to more/less? These are active decisions we get to make, and it is exciting to think about how to cultivate community from scratch for this new life. I know that the kid’s school/activities communities will be new for us too, but what about the ones we are part of now? I think we can reasonably say our families will always be there and they will be a big part of our lives. Our jobs, college community, and neighbors will too. But in addition to the day-to-day, there is a beautiful burgeoning community that we are consciously and actively a part of, namely the FCHS/IHS community. This community is something we have carefully cultivated over the last couple of years, and is continuing to grow and get stronger all the time. It has contributed to our growth as thinkers and academics so much that I think making sure this community remains strong over time will be very important for us. I’d love to hear your thoughts on all of this so we can consciously move forward with the next great adventure of our lives…
The best part about all of this is that I get to be with you throughout. For me, the ultimate community is what I get to have all day, every day with you. Thanks to this little micro-community we have formed, I have grown so much as a person, I have learned so many things, and I have had the best times of my life. Thanks to you, I feel like I finally have “my people”. Now, we can let everything else come and go, but we’ll always be together. Having you in my life means that I am so much stronger in withstanding the ebbs and flows, the vicissitudes of life. What does community mean for me, then, with respect to you? It means having a safe space where you can just be. Just be yourself. Express the things that are on your mind, and allow yourself to relax into being held in communion without fear, and feel confident that you will only improve as a person. Have faith that you are part of a team that will think and work together to achieve collective goals, not just for ourselves, but as a unit that supports others in need.
[For me, this is the meaning of faith, too — it has nothing to do with some higher power, but rather is the faith in my fellow human beings (you, in this case) that we as a community will act together for the betterment of all. Faith that we will remain a team throughout everything. This is so much more powerful, in my opinion, than having faith in some higher power, where there is no risk involved in having that faith.]
I’m so glad I found you, Prea. Thank you, thank you, thank you a thousand times for being who you are.
And guess what, we’re adding to our beautiful little community in May 2023!
I love you forever,
Varun