This year's #HarmonyWeek is the perfect time to reflect on what it means to belong in the community. Growing up in Australia always conferred great material benefits and opportunities for people like myself - that Australia has provided me and my family with the chance to live a fulfilling life is beyond question.
Despite this, growing up brown in a mostly white country, and experiencing life in a very diverse community, I always felt resoundingly misunderstood.
I was proverbially too brown to be white and too white to be brown.
My parents encouraged me to learn as much as I could about the local culture, and to be faithful to my own at the same time. I tried to do this as humanly possible, but the message I was constantly getting from the community, and even my own teachers was that to be 'brown' or 'different' is not as desirable as it is to be 'one of us'.
By this of course, they meant to be 'more like them', and to make changes in my young life that would make their lives easier. This translated into seemingly innocuous but altogether deleterious amendments in my youth - changes like shortening the way my name is pronounced, to more harmful and mentally detrimental adjustments like rejecting my mother tongue and disowning my own religion.
It is only now, as an adult about to hit my 30s that I realise something. I do not need to change who I am to belong. Nor do I need to amend or disregard my own culture - a culture that has been nurtured in the ongoing traditions and practices of the continuum of Indian culture for thousands of years - to be considered 'one of us'.
What it means to be Australian in the 21st century is something quite different to what it did even three decades ago. If all of Australia was the same, it wouldn't be a very exciting place to be. What makes us unique as a country is that we are different, and that this difference brings with it unique opportunities to learn more about each other and the world.
Sure there are bumps along the road, bouts of tension and of distrust that springs up between the community and within it. But, Australia, and indeed, the Indian community in Australia, have grown wealthier for this exchange.
I grew up as 'Nav' instead of Navishkar. As someone who despised my religion, without realising that it encouraged independent and critical thought, and as someone who was ashamed of my colour and what it meant to mainstream society.
This week has reaffirmed my commitment to myself and my culture. I am the descendant of Girmityas, who against their will were taken from their home to a land half the world away to toil in the fields as slaves. I am their son, a son of colonialism and of a community that knows hardship.
I am also Australian, and I am proud that I can be both my genuine Desi self, and a true blue Aussie at the same time.
That is what Australia should be.
