Textual Poaching

Link to the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zw8fCvlwgBI

The aspect of my identity that I chose to focus on for this week's assignment is my Indian heritage.  This is a part of me that I have always been at war with, because I was raised in the United States with little to no Indian influence.  While I am only half, I still consider myself to be (at least partially) a part of that culture.  And for a good part of my life, I didn't really realize what that meant.  I didn't understand that my dad was different than my mom, or that I was different from Blue Eyed Blonde Haired Suzie.  I was just like everyone else.  And then one day I wasn't.

I took inspiration for this through the film Slumdog Millionaire, because I loved the representation of the rural peoples in that film, and was hoping to find a similar atmosphere.  So with this in mind, I gathered a lot of different footage of Indian women off youtube, because I have always been fascinated by the culture surrounding women in India.  My dad has told me stories of his mother and how she was sold to marriage by her brother because she wanted to be a Bollywood movie star.  She is one of many repressed and silenced women of India, and I absolutely love the way that despite their circumstances they are so strong and proud and beautiful.  And then I found a video of a leopard attacking a bunch of Indian villagers that I thought really represented the way that I sort of fought with my own identity for a while.  The leopard lashes out because it is scared, because it is threatened.  And that last shot of it cowering behind a wall, and all you can see are they eyes, is very beautiful to me and means a lot.  So then, with these video clips, I recorded my father rambling and paired it with the video clips, which I think juxtaposes and correlates with the videos.  This in itself is a representation of my two different cultures in me.

I think the ultimate product turned out okay.  The overall message I wanted to get across with the video is that I love both sides of me, even though it is inconvenient.  The beauty is shown in the beginning, and the hardship is shown at the end.  And even though these two sides of me have given me grief, I love them both.  And I am happy for both.  And there are some days when I wish I was either just one or neither, I do love what I am made of.  The reading on the Velveteen rabbit really put things in perspective, especially when it talks about what makes something Real.  And I think that in my case, being real is accepting all the warring attributes in ones life.  Being real means being discriminated, it means being cheated and loved and lied to and cherished.  It means knowing who you are and not wanting to change.