I believe I can fly

Lately I have been thinking about this whole ABCD thing. No I have not developed a problem with the English Language alphabets, I am talking about the term ABCD. To those who don't know and who are coincidentally the people living under a rock, ABCD stands for American Born Confused Desis. To those who don't know and who are coincidentally the people living under a rock, people from the Indo-Pak Sub-continent refer to themselves as Desis meaning a person from their country as opposed to a Pardesi which means a foreigner. Now the ABCDs are the second or third or even fourth generation Desis born to American immigrants of Indian or Pakistani descent. The name, undoubtedly given to them by a Non-Resident Desi, is in no way meant to be derogatory term, contrary to what many ABCD may have you believing. They are called that because many believe them to be lost and confused about their true identity, culture and heritage. They are caught in the middle of two contradictory ways of life and sets of morals and values, one being that of their own country, followed by their American friends and the other forced on them by their parents and family, which results in utter confusion, usually further heightened by frequent trips to their ancestral homeland.
In retaliation the ABCDs call us lowly international students and newly migrated members of the American work force as 'FOBs' which of course is not a new term and has always been used to describe the new immigrants as "Fresh off the Boat". Derogatory? Maybe, but that is not the focus of my recent musings.
Is the term ABCD still relevant? Can the naturalized Asian Indian/Indian American/East Indian American citizens still be considered confused? After being a part of this society for almost a century are they still looking for a sense of belonging? Are they still suffering from an identity crisis? Slowly and steadily they have become fully integrated and incorporated into the various sectors of this society. They are the IT gurus, successful CEOs, politicians, presidential advisers, Scientific geniuses and entertainers. And since the stereotype of a Desi has changed from a Motel/gas station/liquor store owner to that of an Engineering/mathematical/software genius, the ethnic group has risen in stature, its culture being hailed and accepted, and it is getting incorporated into the various aspects of the society. With this change, I believe, the ABCDs are becoming less insecure and developing a more confident sense of belonging and an association with this country. So I guess they are not as much of ABCDs as they once used to be.
But whenever I look at people around me, people I know, co-workers, friends, friends of friends, people from my generation and the generation after, I realise that in actuality it is we who are really confused. Who are we? We are the post-Internet globalized 21st century Desis, who are still desi enough to consider arranged marriages, but are Americanized enough to have the sense of space and personal freedom and satisfaction. We have all fallen victims to our parents' guilt trips and harsh parenting skills, which ensured that we remain under-confident, lacking of a strong sense of self-worth and self-esteem and feeling that if we ever think of ourselves we are extremely selfish and there is no one worse than us. We still live under a gigantic cloud of parental, societal, religious and personal expectations, mostly unrealistic. We mostly find ourselves in the fields of engineering, medicine and IT and we also mostly find ourselves hating it and being miserable. What made it worse is that we got exposed to the other side of the world, to the things that could have been and can be, things that should have been and should be. We are not necessarily rebellious, but we are dying with the contradictions swimming around in our heads, contradictions between what we want to do and what we have to and should do, between what we have been told is right and what we KNOW is right. We have come to realise the societal and religious hypocrisies that is a part and parcel of the two Desi societies and we hate that we have to participate in these ideas and worse that we have to make them our own. And no matter how old we get or how self-aware we become , or how independent we may be, we are still rooted in the cultural and moral values and societal and parental expectations, even though we don't believe in many of them.
I (and I know for a fact that I am not alone), found myself to be misfit from the day I was born. I never felt like I belonged, anywhere. I didn't agree with many things around me. I did believe in the values that were given to me, but I didn't understand why people lived their lives in complete contrast to those values. I didn't agree with being like everyone else, behaving like everyone else. I didn't want to study what everyone expected me to study, I didn't agree with how people treated other people. I hated the class difference, the double standards, the way people treated and considered love. I thought I was a freak, a view shared by many, many and I may add another many, people. I tried so hard to fit in, didn't work. I tried so hard not to fit in, well that of course didn't work. Anyway life happened, years passed and I landed in the US of A. I thought I was free. I could finally learn who I was, be who I am and discover what I wanted in life, you know all that Oprahish stuff.
But guess what? When I came here, I brought an excess baggage that I had no idea about but have to pay a very high price for. The Gigantic cloud of expectations, the societal prejudices and the last but not the least guilt! Sounds familiar?
I and other Desis like me are living with this baggage. Day in and day out, we struggle to break free of it and finally be who we want to be and do what we want to do, but the guilt holds us back, we have become our own society, our own parents our own annoying bu'aas and Phoopos with their judgmental and disapproving looks and irritating Haa haeyyys. Contradiction. Our lives turned around, we are still confused and still struggling. And hence the new term ACDs - Americanised confused desis :)
To the people who read this, who I know are just as ACD as I am, and to myself I say...let go. Let go of who you think your parents want you to be, let go of who the society expects you to be with, let go of what you have been told marriage should be like, let go of the societal criteria of success, of a good spouse, a good man, a good woman, a good child and a good life. Let go, be free, live and let live, and be true to who you are. Distinguish between what about our values and culture is good and fair and what is a truck full load of crap. Our culture gives us more good than bad, we just have to dig deeper.