Anti-Social

I used to love having people around me all the time. Be it friends, family or just strangers, it didn't matter as long as there was someone around me. The noise, activity, conversations etc. kind of gave me a sense of belonging that despite me knowing someone or not, I was still somebody in the presence of somebody else. All that has changed so much in the last few years. Ever since I moved to NJ, over time I have become socially reclusive and now, the lonelier I am, the more at peace I am.

Thinking about what may have brought about that change, I realized that a lot had to do with just adjusting over here. When I joined college over here, it was a culture shock to me. I was not aware or familiar with the concept of having different classes at different times, in different buildings with different people. Trying to mingle with crowd was difficult because I had nothing in common as such and everything seemed so alien to me. I did not have much to say as such in any conversation because most of the time the conversations were only related to bf’s/gf’s/clubbing especially with the ABCD crowd. Secondly, one thing I noticed in an ABCD crowd is that there were almost never any FOB’s in it. FOB’s were always viewed differently and hence the FOB’s usually isolated themselves from the ABCD’s. The movie ‘Where’s the party yaar’ is exactly what I saw and went through in college. Of course this doesn’t happen all the time but this was what I noticed when I was in college.

I related a lot with the few FOB’s that existed in the college that I went to. Usually people from India come here to do their masters and hence most of the time, most of the people in the program are FOB’s and hence making friends again is not that difficult. Then you have roommates etc. I joined the university in a Bachelor’s program and I used to live 10 minutes away from college. There was no reason to dorm or anything as such and hence the roommate experience was also absent. Slowly over time, I just got used to the fact that maybe over here there might not arise an occasion where I could once again belong to a circle of friends. I made a lot of acquaintances along the way but was never able to make any good friends as such.

Another drawback that has resulted because of this is that now, whenever I go back home and we friends do hang out, I feel like a stranger among them too. I can’t relate to most of the conversations because it most of the time involves something that I am so not familiar with. I guess I have just grown apart from them because all of them remained back home and are living lives that are intertwined in some way or the other whereas I just come and go. There is nothing common between them and me anymore and I wonder whether in the end, all of this is really worth it. I came here, got a great education, have a good home (with parents of course), got a decent job…but at the expense of what?

A cousin of mine just moved here too. He is still in high school though. However, I do see some of the things; I went through, happening with him. He feels like an outcast here and is slowly growing apart from his friends back home. He is still in high school though, which might give him an advantage in terms of having the possibility of eventually making a decent friends circle before he hits college. Else, he is eventually going to just become just another me. Lonely and socially reclusive and when there are opportunities to make friends, you just don’t know what to do or say after a certain point…

All this is just some of the losses on a social side…The losses on the family front is a totally different chapter altogether…All in all I wonder that if I had come here to do my masters and was living away from my parents then would my situation have been different (just in USA that is). Would I have been able to make more friends since I might have been living with a few and hence we might have become a good bunch of friends? Should I have completed my education from India applied for an h-1 from India and then come here, like most of my friends? Maybe I would’ve met a few h-1 people and we would’ve shared something and eventually became good friends…Maybe….just maybe, I would’ve regained my sense of belonging.

P.S.: Sorry for the classifications of ABCD's and FOB's. I wasnt sure of how else to distinguish the two.