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A Dutiful Mind

Here’s something wonderful. It’s a reflection by Deep J. Shah, a fourth-year Harvard medical student, a Rhodes Scholar, and a recent reader of The Little Way Of Ruthie Leming. He sent it to me after finishing the book, which resonated with his own experience. Deep plans to return to Atlanta, his hometown, after graduation and […]

Here’s something wonderful. It’s a reflection by Deep J. Shah, a fourth-year Harvard medical student, a Rhodes Scholar, and a recent reader of The Little Way Of Ruthie Leming. He sent it to me after finishing the book, which resonated with his own experience. Deep plans to return to Atlanta, his hometown, after graduation and serve his community as a physician. Even though my book is set in the American South, among a Christian family and community, this piece shows that the themes in and the lessons of Little Way are universal. I publish this with the author’s permission:

This coming weekend, we will celebrate our mothers, the greatest examples of duty and charity for many of us. In our family, we joke that everyday is Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and Siblings Day because of the close relationships we share with each other. After reading Rod Dreher’s touching new memoir The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, I have felt moved to share more of our family’s story.

Dreher’s narrative resonates closely with ours and many immigrant families. Though the rural Louisianan culture and clothes might seem less foreign than the saris and sweets of post-colonial India, they both contrast with mainstream America in a way that may be confusing and isolating for young people at the center of the conflict. And for me, like Dreher, the experience has revealed that family is paramount, and that cultivating a dutiful nature is central to my happiness.

Deep J. Shah
Deep J. Shah

One of the most symbolic events for our family comes every August, when my sisters tie a rakhi around my wrist. In the ancient Indian tradition of Raksha Bandhan, the bright orange and red rakhis (bracelets) celebrate the enduring bonds of family. The holiday is one of many reminders that I am connected to the individuals and communities that have shaped me, that my successes and failures are a collective experience. But while this model of kinship sustains inspires me today, I struggled for many years to reconcile this ideal of collectivism with the American virtue of individualism.

Growing up, my sisters and I were exposed to an array of moralistic myths: among our favorites were Biblical parables, Hindu poems, and Aesop’s fables. And while these stories helped calibrate my ethical compass, it was my parents’ way of living that impressed on me the meaning of duty. In tracing their paths, I learned being dutiful is a choice – an opportunity, not an obligation. For me, the decision began with accepting that my happiness and well-being are highly dependent on my parents and siblings. Our solidarity is my strength.

In the early 1970s, my mother and father graduated from medical school in Gujarat and moved to the U.S. with a dutiful worldview. They admired two features of this outlook: 1) its promise of personal satisfaction and 2) its direct and indirect benefits to others. By 1985, the year of my birth, my family had moved to a modest house in the suburbs of Atlanta. My dad’s parents and one of his sisters lived with us; they were the first of many relatives we would help settle in America. My sisters began school, and my parents struggled to open a medical practice. And if these duties were not enough, they were balanced against others to our extended family, the local community, and each other. Even as a child, I was struck by their effort to approach every task with joy and devotion.

But as a teenager, I turned skeptical. Mummy complained of overbearing in-laws and perpetual fatigue. Papa missed most school events due to work obligations. And many weekends, when I would have preferred the company of friends, I was forced to join them for family outings or social events. My parents never seemed to regret their decision to be dutiful. At the time, I thought they must have been secretly miserable. That is how the overworked and overcommitted are supposed to feel. My parents’ lives were incongruent with the only pattern that I, as a young American, had seen or thought possible.

In the U.S., tremendous resources are dedicated to promoting individualism and freedom of choice, which I internalized as duty to oneself. Self-reliance and independence were natural strengths that I wanted to develop. In school, mentors and classmates praised my outgoing personality and entrepreneurial instincts. Over time, though, my achievements transformed confidence into hubris. Academic and social influences devoted little attention to the communitarian values I witnessed at home. “I [was] a rock, I [was] an island.”

Balancing my two worldviews act was exhausting, even cliché. Who isn’t Gogal Ganguli? As I focused on my own aspirations and desires, my parents continued to speak of duty and dharma. They discouraged the usual list of endeavors that threatened their beliefs: dating, unsupervised vacations, forays into non-traditional careers, and the like. “If you do something that brings others unhappiness, then you’ll ultimately be unhappy, too. We want what’s best for you. And what’s best for the rest of us.”

I denounced these statements as emotional blackmail. Why, then, did I usually concede? And why haven’t I come to resent them for it?

Our disagreements became points of discussion, challenging me to think more carefully about my actions and desires. I felt compelled to make a choice between duty to others and duty to myself. Through which lens did I wish to see the world?

As a graduate and medical student, I’ve sought to answer this question through literature, science, and self-reflection. And more specifically, to determine if reaching for a life of duty to others will, in fact, make me the most joyful, authentic version of myself. I have come to think it will, but it is not the either/or dichotomy that I trapped myself in as an adolescent. Duty to yourself and others are complementary virtues.

In contrast to what is written in dictionaries and Tiger Mom tales, duty is driven neither by obligation nor by blind loyalty. It is not about idly adhering to the wishes of my parents. Duty is the internal motivation to build a life that values the happiness of loved ones and neighbors as much as my own. It is a commitment to finding compromise in the face of disagreement. Together, we are resilient in ways that are exceedingly difficult alone.

In South Asian culture, relationships lack determinate beginnings and ends. If a relationship has ever had meaning, then it always will. The age of eighteen does not mark diminished reliance on family for guidance. When could the support of my parents and sisters be more important than in my 20s and 30s, as I begin a career, meet my spouse, and have children?

In an equally valuable way, our Judeo-Christian foundations in the U.S. call us to care for our families and serve our communities. One of the essential lessons our family has learned from Western culture is to move beyond a simplistic vision of duty and recognize that, without strong individual identities, our community will eventually cease to have one at all.

We’ve seen the destructive consequences of duty interpreted at an extreme on both sides of our family, when individuals have had limitless expectations of what duty encompassed. Their conflicts could have been minimized with greater appropriation of Western values. So I set boundaries when fulfilling a given duty seems unreasonable, or its charm outweighed by its pain.

I have had the opportunity to embrace a heritage that acknowledges our interdependence and the fragility of human nature. At the same time, I was raised in a culture that empowers me to use my unique gifts to support ideals greater than any one person. The marriage of these two philosophies, like any other, requires commitment and effort. It can be confusing, tiring, and frustrating. But in those moments, I no longer worry. I look to my wrist and think of the colorful rakhis that were once tied and will be tied again. And I remember that even on this journey, deeply personal and individual, I am not alone.

Deep J. Shah adds, “Special thanks to Dr. Ravi Shah, a psychiatry resident at Columbia, for first exploring these issues with me as a high school student.” E-mail the author at deepjshah (at) gmail.com

 

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