My childhood years were spent in different States across India. I soaked in different cultures and learned to overcome cultural barriers. I realized looking back that this has been a blessing in many ways, helping me stay open, curious and more accepting of people and even situations many a time. But the whole process till I would get settled in and start bonding with people would naturally take some time. And by the time I made friends, we would invariably end up moving out of that place to yet another state
Deborah Pardes
@DBPardes · 3:02
And when I ran a literacy project, I integrated some of the work we were doing into families that kept on moving because literacy rates and rates are traditionally low among kids who move a lot because sometimes they have learning disabilities that are never detected because they're not in the school long enough. So I got to know a couple of people. My father also served in the United States Army for 43 years, but we were only at one place the entire time
Vijayam Raghu
@VjmRaghunathan · 3:12
And in India, we have, like, over 28 plus languages in the country, which is like a worldwide set. So this helped me a lot. And maybe my outgoing nature, maybe the quality of my life changed for the better. And I have a feeling that I was more daring because of that, I would never shy of anything. If there's something that had to be done. My mother would tell me to go and do it
And though I hated every moment of it because we would kind of get used to one place, one school, and then suddenly you're approached and thrown into another. I realized when I look back that it helped me so much in terms of opening up to people from various cultures. And it wouldn't take me very long to reach out to people from different cultures to kind of establish a bond with them