RAJUL AVALANI

“Our life that we had in India is very different from the life that you guys lead here. We used to come back from school pretty late and my best memories — I always find that the kids growing up here don't have this — is that we grew up in an apartment and there would be a compound or a play area on the grounds. There were no swings or those kinds of play areas — [we] would actually have physical sports and we would play games. And one of the things that I find amazing is that when we grew up, we would look forward to coming home, having our snack and going straight to the play area downstairs. All the kids would be down and we would be playing for two hours straight until our parents would call and say, ‘Hey, dinner's ready, you need to get home.’ I remember that is one of the fondest memories I had — the two hours of dedicated time, where our parents never had to go up and say, ‘Hey I want to schedule a playdate with X and X person,’ you just go down [and] you go have fun. When you talk about the term ‘It takes a village to grow a kid,’ it was literally that for us because not only would our parents be mentoring us or guiding us, but neighbors [and] family members had great input. Out here what I noticed is that we don't have so much of those things. You do have communities but [they] are more like subsections. Nobody's ever going to come and correct your kid because people feel very concerned that they don't want to overstep their boundaries, whereas in [India] people never had those concerns. They would be in your business, and at times more than you wanted them to be, so there's of course the other side to it too. But in more ways than one, it's always very useful to have that. 

I missed that part for my kids when they were growing up because it really is fun to go outside in the neighborhood and go and play and have your own time. And it's a very different set of friends from the ones you interact with at school or go to your classes [with]. That bond is very different than the bond you would have with [other friends].”