USC India and the fortune of finding a second family.

This won’t come as a surprise to many, but if you did not already know, I grew up in India. I’ve always seen myself as being very fortunate. I grew up very close (emotionally and geographically) to both sets of my grandparents. Some of my best friends are my cousins. I’ve always been very close to both my mom and my dad, and even though my brother was four and half years older than me, till today he is one of my closest confidantes. 

As you can imagine, moving to college was a big change for me. I had never lived anywhere but home before and suddenly I was going to be on literally the other side of the world, far away from the family I was so close to. Of course, I was excited, but at the same time a part of me was a little sad that I had to move away from home.                  

I’ve always said home wasn’t a place, but the people. It’s cheesy, I know, but it is something I really believe. USC become my second home, in every sense of the word, and it is because of the people I have around. My USC family, all from India. 

I have a lot of pins that represent my country or city. While I can, and perhaps will, write about India and Mumbai and how they’ve made me who I am, this pin represents something different. It honours my second family.  

I have a group of about 16 friends from back home that have made University special for me. They’ve been there through my highs and lows at college, and when I fall sick or just need a shoulder to lean on, they’re always there for me. Most of us met in our freshman year and got each other through our first few months of being homesick. Today, most of us live in the same building. I am writing this blog post while studying with two of them. My college experience would not have been the same without them. 

There’s far too much I can say about what they mean to me. There are far too many stories to tell. So instead I will say this. Like any family we fight, but under everything there is always love. Josh Peck once said, “in family you’re allowed to fight, because family doesn’t leave,” and for us, that’s so true. We mess up, we fight, we even go to bed angry, but at the end of it all we always squash it, because family never leaves. 

The pin I’m highlighting today is one I got at the USC bookstore. USC has a really cool pin collection on sale, and sometime last year I realised they had one for their large population of Indian students. Me being me, I had to get it. It’s a super cool design, a simple but striking “SC,” coloured in with the Indian flag. It’s good quality too and the silver accents gleam when the sun hits it just right. It wasn’t my intention for this pin to represent my group of friends. I bought it because it represented both USC and India, but overtime, I realised how it also reflected my affection for my group of friends. I wear this pin with love, lucky to have even more people who have my back and vice versa. Like I said, I always thought of myself as fortunate. Unfortunately, sometimes people don’t even get to have one great family. I am lucky enough to have two.