My hair is the most important part of my presentation. I’m also awfully reckless with it. 

The first time I dyed it, I made the brilliant decision of bleaching it first - which I did without appropriate equipment, in my bathroom, with two other people on the phone who didn’t once try to talk me out of it. My hair was some odd shade of purple afterwards, and it’s still damaged from the incident. Three months later, I decided that that wasn’t enough - I needed to damage a different part of my hair. I went red two weeks before my boards and was told to focus on work instead of distracting myself with irrelevant things (and this only grows funnier in hindsight).

Despite the mess I had made, I felt, for the first time, like I looked the way I was supposed to. Growing up, I believed white people were inherently more beautiful than POC - not just because of their Eurocentric features, but because my friends and I never really felt like we looked ‘right’, whereas white kids always seemed so self-assured in their appearance. That has little to do with their physical features and so much to do with their autonomy in their appearances growing up. For white kids, turning sixteen seems to signify getting a third piercing or dyeing their hair, but for many people here in India, all being sixteen really seems to mean is board exams. So many Indian people only seem to start discovering themselves during adulthood because we’ve actively been discouraged from exploring our identities and experimenting with our appearances as children. 

Hair is also a big source of gender affirmation for non-cisgender people. Yes, I cut my hair relentlessly because it’s a cathartic experience, but I also cut it because I can’t tolerate the thought of having to braid it for school. But if I were to tell an authority figure that cutting my hair makes me less dysphoric, they probably wouldn’t be able to empathise with me. I’ve been told several times by my parents that being openly queer and ‘having pronouns’ is a white people thing. That gender dysphoria is a first-world problem, and that it’s only a grain of sand in the deserts that my parents and grandparents have crossed. I still don’t fully understand why my desperate attempts to describe my identity seem foreign to my parents.

This is part of the reason there is a lack of Indian representation in queer media, and vice versa. It seems, somehow, as though Indianness and queerness cannot be intersecting identities. Diverse content is nearly impossible to find unless you explicitly search for it. Even within queer communities online, I rarely find people genderbending or breaking binaries within ethnic Indian attire. My parents seemed to share in this observation: Boys in skirts? That’s a white people thing. Boys in lehengas? That’s almost unheard of. You won’t see it, not unless you scour the earth specifically looking for it.

By ‘white people’, my parents refer to kids in America on Twitter who tweet about the overturning of Roe v Wade and how much they hate their own government. In Indian communities, America is seen as one of the most self-loathing countries. They think American kids are too self aware for their own good. And subsequently, the fraction of our generation in India that hates our own government is seen as ‘whitewashed’, almost as though any degree of individualism is dismissed as a foreign concept. Recently, my psychology teacher was talking about how most modern psychology is WEIRD (western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic) - and it’s important that we recognise the privilege behind being able to easily orient our mindsets to WEIRD thinking without having to first deconstruct our worldviews. And I recognise that I’m inclined to WEIRD thinking as a result of consuming almost exclusively Western-dominated media growing up, while my parents don’t have the same context. They don’t see everyday things through the same lens as me, and I can empathise with them on that.

It isn’t even true that the entire young population of Americans is completely self-centred and hyper-individualistic. In their defence, Americans have definitely realised how extreme me-ism has led to the modern capitalistic hellhole that is America. People who challenge their own government are usually trying to build a healthier community, not break it apart. Historically, nationalism has only been thought possible for homogeneous communities. France, for example, put in years of work to erase language dialects in order to create a uniform, and therefore more united (and patriotic) nation-state. They’re continuing to enforce this archaic tradition with their latest hijab ban, which seems to perpetuate the notion that in order to be equal, people must be similar. Which just isn’t reality, because if people are given the opportunity to express themselves, they’ll inevitably diverge from each other.

Even still, I don’t get it; I don’t get why individualism isn’t celebrated with the same enthusiasm as togetherness in this country. I don’t get why having purple hair and pronouns has to be a white person thing. And I don’t get how the same people who stand up for the national anthem on Independence Day and call themselves proud Indians claim that identity and individualism are white people concepts. 

Anyway, I’m thinking I’ll dye my hair all the rainbow pride flag colours this December. Just for the fun of it.