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Reading a book on the
beach during middle school. |
Puja Parekh
May 9, 2006
LR Final
There was once a
time when I had a wild imagination. This imaginative time was during my
elementary and middle school years in
During these vital years I became an idealist. Spending large amounts of time in escapist literature wreaked havoc on the cynicism my brothers had instilled in me. I began to dream. At first, my dreams weren’t too extravagant. Although the volume of the cynical voice had been turned down, it was still fairly audible. I wanted a few simple things at this point - my greatest wish being to live in the same world as the girls in my books. I became strangely drawn to R.L. Stine’s Fear Street series, because the protagonists were always ‘normal’ high-school females, and they always triumphed over scary evil beings. Don’t get me wrong, I had no intention of fighting trolls or goblins on my own; I just wanted to lead the normal, high-school part of their lives. I remember that I became fixated on going to high school in America, where I could actually talk to boys in public, join organizations like the dance team or the Red Cross, and go to the always-hyped school dances. Looking back now, I find it interesting that I wanted so badly to come to America for more than a summer, especially since I detested it so much for the first year after actually moving here.
My dreams and aspirations for myself have, as expected, also changed drastically since my childhood. My earliest goal was to become neither an astronaut nor a pilot, but a computer engineer. I know that’s a ridiculous dream for a eight-year-old, but my father had just bought a shiny new Gateway 2000 in 1994, and I spent as many hours as I could playing and exploring on the machine. We didn’t even have the internet in Saudi Arabia back then, so I amused myself with the endless supply of information that the Encarta Encyclopedia provided. Like my fantasy and science fiction stories, these articles transported me away from my drab life. This time, however, reality, and not an author’s imagination, surrounded me. The world seemed even more fascinating when I considered that these articles were factual, and I delighted in learning about the metal box that revealed them to me.
This dream was replaced by dreams of fame and popularity with the arrival of my pre-teen and early teenage years. Either Saudi Arabian rules had started getting relaxed, or people were having greater success shirking them. I suddenly found myself with much easier access to Indian (and occasionally American) movies. I yearned to be like the beautiful woman on the big screen, who could be simultaneously brave, intelligent and beautiful in the face of adversity. I wanted to become this actress who had the opportunity to play a variety of characters in different spheres of life. As an actress I could be a teacher, doctor, lawyer or whatever else I wanted, while living a sensational life off-screen. But as I grew older and became more aware of the paparazzi and the tabloids I realized that even this life was not as glamorous as I had originally thought it to be.
I moved to America my sophomore year in high school. I think I had barely been in school a week before the culture shock hit me. Although my freedom in Saudi Arabia had been severely restricted, I had cultivated strong relationships with my friends over twelve years. My classmates had become an extension of my family, and coming to this country where everyone functions according to their own agendas was difficult for me to handle. People would see you only if it fit into their schedule; I felt that no one except my immediate family would go out of their way to help me. At school, I found myself unable to relate to any of my classmates. Everyone simply seemed selfish to me. In fact, Sugar Land was where I first saw what high school drama really was. My friends and I had our fair share of arguments in Saudi Arabia, but we always stuck by each other when an external danger was involved. Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw here: lifelong friendships being dissolved upon the word of a jealous firebrand. None of my peers seemed to have much faith in each other, and as a result I found myself unable to trust them in return. While I suffered from a lack of friends in school, my mother went through the same experience at home. The friends she had before leaving America twelve years prior had all changed – deep friendships had become mere acquaintances. The lack of a social circle both in and out of school limited my daily routine to school and home for several months, with a few trips to the mall thrown in between.
Taking the suggestions of my family friends, I tried joining various clubs and quickly became attached to my high school’s chapter of the Red Cross Club. Volunteering meant more to me than the résumé padding my parents intended it to be. As cliché as it sounds, my Saturday mornings were more meaningful when I spent them at the local nursing home. It did not matter
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The officers of my high school’s Red Cross Club. |
to me that I had no parties to attend or picnics to go to; I was happy being of some help to my community. My parents encouraged volunteering as well; after all, helping fellow beings is one of the central tenants of Jainism. I made a few friends through the volunteering organizations that introduced me to like-minded others. My passion for volunteering and social work stayed with me through the next three years, even when the culture shock had worn off and I had made friends. I had more than two-hundred-and-fifty volunteering hours when I graduated, and I had enjoyed every one.
There were a few positive aspects to not having friends as well. Since my brothers were in Austin, I was more or less a single child. My father worked in Victoria, Texas, so he would come home only on the weekends. My mother and I were able to grow closer since neither of us had anyone else to go to. She began to confide in me about things she would sometimes not even tell my father. This is how I came to know the person behind the supermom façade. I became privy her insecurities and her dreams, and what exactly made her the person she was. My mother told me tales of her aspirations to become a doctor, and how she fell short of her goal because her conservative parents would not let her attend a university outside the city they resided in. I made up my mind to do everything in my power to reach my goals, and she resolved to do all she could to help me. It was also during our family bonding time that I found the career of my dreams. We often watched television together in the evenings, and one of our favorite shows was
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My mother and I on our way
to Garba (an Indian dancing festival). |
The Practice. The more I watched the show, the more I realized that I wanted to be the one fighting for the rights of the weak. I began to dream of defending the destitute and of preventing large corporations from ruining the lives of the disadvantaged. I do admit that my dreams were slightly more dramatic than normal, but with an imagination such as mine, that is to be expected.
Now that I’m in college, I have settled on a course of action for the upcoming years. My future itself, however, continues to remain a mystery. Surprisingly, I like it that way. My answer to the ever common question “If you could spend a day in either the past or the future, which would you choose?” has always been the past. There are two reasons for this. First, knowing what is to come somehow binds me to that path and makes me feel as though I have no choice in my future. Blame this on the crazy science fiction stories I grew up reading, but my controlling nature cannot accept any insinuation that my fate is out of my hands. The second reason is that I
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I love history, as my outfit for Victorian Day shows. |
feel a strong connection to the past. I come from a household that is strongly rooted in tradition, and I think this has become a vital part of me. Looking at the past, whether in class or at home, always teaches me new things both about myself and the world. Great men and women have lived in the past, and I think it would be naïve of us to not try and learn from their experiences. I agree that one has to be unique in order to be great, but even the greatest leaders of this country have learned from example.
My vision for the future stems from all of my earlier dreams; except the computer engineering one, perhaps. That one died when both of my brothers majored in Computer Science here at UT. I have decided to become a lawyer, and work for the entertainment industry. I hope to help prevent artists from being abused by major record labels and maybe even become an agent one day. The rest of my vision was actually inspired by Oprah Winfrey. She does so much for the underprivileged in countries such as Ethiopia and Afghanistan, and her generosity makes her my role model. I can only dream that through my work as a lawyer, I will be able to make enough money to do a fraction of the charity work that she does, yet keep far enough from the spotlight to have anonymity. I feel that philanthropy is the only way for me to be a useful member of society while staying true to my own ideals and goals.
My dreams, however, go past just my professional career, and as strange as it may sound, Jainism plays a large role in this. I have been taught to love and respect my surroundings for as long as I can remember. I have vivid memories of being told to ‘apologize’ to the book I stepped on by mistake as this was an insult to all Knowledge. Spiders and mosquitoes were not supposed to be killed in my house; they were to be gently swept out or caught and released outside. Death, no matter whether it was of a cockroach or a cat, was a sad occurrence. After all, were not all of these nature’s creatures? What rule demanded that we suffer more remorse over the death of a pet than a roadside opossum? I was taught that all living beings were equal, and we had no power to decide who was ‘important’ enough to stay alive and who simply did not make the cut. As a result of this, going out into nature always felt like returning home. I was not at war with my environment; I was simply a part of it. And like every true lover of nature, I too dream of a world where there is no more extinction, and global warming is no longer such a prevalent threat to humanity.
My love for nature motivated to become more involved in saving my environment and preventing animal cruelty. I may not be a PETA extremist, but my heart does ache every time I hear about the atrocities of animal testing and such. My best friend Janet, who wants to be a veterinarian, and I founded the Animal Rights Club at my school our senior year, and spent hours volunteering at animal shelters. Our most important job, however, was to spread the word. The average person was not aware of the extent of animal cruelty, and we made it our mission to tell them. This was made especially difficult because we lived in Sugar Land, the home of Tom Delay. Most of the people around us were conservatives, and they would see us as crazy animal lovers and tree huggers if we pushed too hard. Because of this, we had to tailor our message to
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Sitting
at the Turtle Ponds. |
our audience, and we put the focus more on the poor, starving cats and dogs at the local shelter
than on the inhumane practices in laboratory testing.
When I first came to UT, I expected to have almost all my ties to nature severed. I figured that I would continuously be swamped in school work and social activities, and have almost no time to go outside and get in touch with my surroundings. This class prevented that. I still thank that fateful day in orientation when I decided to choose Bump’s world literature class over the others. To be honest, I made my decision solely upon the fact that computers would be an integral part of this class. Luckily for me, this class let me play with computers as well as trees, so my nature-loving side was as placated as my technophile one. This course has given me the opportunity to sit in parks, meditate, and observe the amazing world around me; something she had not been able to really do since childhood. I went out to parks to clean them in high school, but I was never able to just lay back and watch. Being close to nature has brought me a peace and serenity that was until now unknown to me. I have found that sitting under a tree at the turtle ponds can be as much of an escape as any book or movie from my childhood was. This class has helped me find a comfortable place both in Austin and in nature; a comfort that I feel is vital to my growth and development as both an intellectual and individual.
Only after I have found a secure place in nature can I move on to surrounding myself with the right people. Looking back at my goals list, I noticed that one of the bigger goals I had for myself was to “understand the relationship between myself and the world around me”. I can finally say that I have found my place at UT and now consider both Austin and Houston as my homes. I have found a social group that I can both relax with as well as debate the merits of History versus Anthropology. Now that freshman year is over and people are moving out of dorms, I realize that we will all probably grow apart. This does not really worry me though; I know that I will still have friends everywhere that I can turn to if the need arises.
During my search for my dreams and goals, I stumbled across Ram Dass’ article in the course anthology. A quick scan reminded me that as human beings we place “greater weight to one aspect of our identity over another”, so in order to fully evaluate these changes it is necessary to look through the eyes of an impersonal being (153). At the end of last semester, I came to the conclusion that most important lesson I learned was to develop an “awareness” (157) of the existence of “dispassionate” (156) entities such as the Witness and recognizing their need and importance. Stumped for more visions and goals, I called upon the Witness to share with me what it had seen. Unfortunately, all it gave me was a love for children and photography, leaving me more or less stranded. I decided to take a deep look as to why I loved these two things, and what impact, if any, they could have had on my plans for the future.
My love for children has been a part of me as long as I can remember. From their hands to their feet, everything about the little beings fascinates me. I recall being amazed at the age of eight by how delicate babies actually were, and how one had to be so careful so as not to hurt them. Personally, I was always afraid that I would somehow break them. I realize now that my fear was ridiculous, but an elementary student can barely be expected to be completely rational. I think this fear of breaking something so delicate and wonderful has allowed me to appreciate children more. The fear might be gone, but the sentiment of awe remains. I know that I want children of my own some day, but I know that the world will have to be a happier and healthier place for them if they are to become what I dream of. This leads me back to my goals of protecting the environment. It now dawns upon me that the Witness might not have been completely unhelpful; my love for children turns out to have deep links with my attempts to improve the environment for posterity.
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A collage of
pictures I have taken. |
What does my love for photography have to do with anything though? I looked through old pictures of mine while trying to answer this question. After coming up with no concrete results, I came to the conclusion that maybe I just like photography because I love beautiful things and people. Maybe it really was that simple. I have absolutely no artistic skills, so perhaps my photography is the only way for me to capture and express the beauty I see around me. Once again, this taste for aesthetics could be linked with my attraction with nature. The more I considered it, the more I agreed with it – there was nothing I could think of that was more beautiful than nature. The Witness proved me wrong once again. Even seemingly unimportant things can be substantial once what it reflects is analyzed.
Upon coming to the conclusion that a personality analysis can help show me why I have the dreams and visions that I do, I turned to the most obvious source – the Meyers-Brigg personality test. The test profiled me as an Extroverted, Sensing, Feeling and Judging person, which is fairly accurate. I am indeed “present oriented” (140); I like to focus on what I could be doing now that could help others. I came across an interpretation of my test results that told me the most important feature of my ideal job is service to others, and my entire paper thus far can attest to this. I am classified as a “Provider Guardian”, the most social of all guardians and the best suited to social and civic work. Apparently my goals are not that far fetched after all; even my subconscious demands that I devote myself to helping others.
In the end, I realize that no matter what field I end up being it, I will be happy as long as someone else is receiving the benefit. This does not necessitate that I devote my life to altruism and philanthropy; it merely means that I will be satisfied as long I remain involved in charity work of some sort. My goals for the future do not involve becoming a billionaire or president and changing the way things run because I know such lofty goals would be impossible to attain. My aim is low enough for reality, but high enough for me to have to work to strike the target. All I have left to do now is devote my mind, body, and spirit to the attainment of these goals.
Word count: 3,301
Old Word Count: 1,741
URL: https://webspace.utexas.edu/pp645/LRFinal.htm