For example, speaking in Hindi made one “Hindi-medium”–not liberally educated or cool enough. To be considered cool and “modern,” it was not enough to speak English; you had to speak English complete with American slang. While my mother and aunts wore cotton suits (salwar kameez) and sarees as everyday casuals, my peers saw them as “traditional” clothes, worn on special occasions, conspicuously buried underneath a “Western-modern” education and urban upbringing. These were the unwritten codes of conduct–not explicitly dictated, but simply imbibed, practiced and re-practiced. It was in the air; something you can’t see but constantly inhale without realizing. This left me feeling fractured from within. I was two selves in one, trying to strike a balance.

When I first saw Ghost World at age 17, I related to Enid. Seeing her twisting and grooving in her bedroom to the movie Gumnaam’s opening song, “Jaan Pehechan Ho,” I recognized that girl who is interested in the culture from far away countries. Years later, I realize I am closer to the unnamed girl in Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. Enid is what the scholar Henry Jenkins calls a “pop-cosmopolitan”: “someone whose embrace of global popular media represents an escape route out of the parochialism of her local community.” But Jenkins is describing an American archetype, not me, and not Amirpour’s nameless Girl. Although people all over the world can appreciate other cultures, white American pop-cosmopolitans like Enid have the choice to take the song on its own without the culture that created it. By contrast, my American obsessions did not exist in their own vacuums–they were inextricable from pressures to assimilate to Western culture, and to whitewash my own.

This recognition didn’t lead me to a rejection of everything that I believed in or practiced growing up. It led me to acknowledge that my self was partially constructed from a prosthetic experience of mass culture through a British and American lens. That I was taught to see Western culture as the norm from which the rest of us deviate, making me feel alien. I had to recognize the alienness of the “dream life” I’d been taught to aspire to, and acquaint myself with the Indian culture from which I had been alienated.

The realization hit hard when I saw myself judging girls in my locality for donning a bindi, while I considered it “cool” when Gwen Stefani wore one in the “Just a Girl” music video. At first, I saw it as validation that Gwen knew about bindis and had interest in Indian culture and traditions. If she considered them cool, that made them cool. I failed to see that only when a part of my heritage was accepted by the West and came back to me via this detour would I acknowledge it as legitimately cool. It was rooted in traditions I grew up surrounded by (if seldom practiced), but I only accepted it as a product stripped of its cultural significance. I thought it was tacky and unmodern on a kurta-wearing brown girl on my street, but beautiful on a white woman in a pop music video.

In fact, I have worn a bindi only twice in my life, and I am 26 years old. Initially because I couldn’t see myself be seen wearing one, for fear of being judged as “desi” or “Indian” or simply not modern enough. The first time I wore a bindi was for my high school’s farewell lunch, when I wore a beautiful silk saree of my mom’s. The second time was my college’s farewell dinner, when I wore a delicate saree that belonged to my grandmother. Post-enlightenment, I still don’t see myself wearing them, but the reasons are different, and so is my perspective. I like wearing a bindi when I am wearing a saree or a salwaar-kameez suit–garments that I hardly wear on a day-to-day basis. Wearing a bindi has never been a part of my daily ritual or routine of getting dressed and stepping out, as it is for my mom and my aunts. Also, I consciously and specifically don’t want to subscribe to the image of a “Coachella girl” or associate with the “Gwen Stefani” look. Their appropriation of the bindi has overshadowed or even replaced the actual cultural meaning of it in the public consciousness to such an extent that it makes me feel that I am appropriating something that belongs to them. Cultural appropriation renders the very people who have naturally inherited a particular tradition to feel like outsiders. The bindi is just one example of the many things integral to my culture that I had mindlessly rejected and superficially disliked, and then missed out on.

I don’t know how much of my taste and judgement are presently colored by this form of cultural imperialism, but I know that I am getting better at unpacking them. I now see my identity as a hybrid: part Indian, part living with a colonial hangover and struggling to decolonize the mind, part transnational, in some ways pop-cosmopolitan. I feel less like an alien, and more like myself. ♦