Gori Girl

Our friends are about 50/50 Indian or other race/nationality.  We have a lot of friends from other countries too, like Turkey, Egypt, Iran, Ghana etc. because of the university and my husband's PhD research group members.  My husband is a really gregarious, sociable person (unlike me, with slightly crippling social anxiety until I get to know someone in real life and/or have a drink or two, heh).  He really keeps up with his buddies from high school or undergrad and I don't know how he does it, but he maintains a lot of friendships.  He also has several Indian friends here who hang out at our house or go out with us regularly.

I only have one Indian female friend…the rest of my friends are from grad school or belly dance.

Our friends and heavily desi. M stayed pretty seclusive in his pre-me years, and only hung out with a group of Pakistanis. His school had a very large Pakistani population because one professor in particular was importing a lot of students from there. When he graduated he was able to get jobs for many of his old friends at his new company, which already was pretty desi-fied anyway. We've met a couple of new "couple" friends at the mosque over the years, too, and although I was proud of our "diversity" they were still all desi (Indian and Bangladeshi…) Much of this situation is because I'm pretty shy and he's trended that way since our marriage for 2 reasons. 1. I'm rubbing off on him and 2. He was betrayed by several of his friends when he decided to marry me, and he's since refused to make new close friends. He has almost no friends that would come to our house socially and the few who would are the remnants of the old group.

In this way, I feel very different than many of you others in the 'online communities' and blogosphere… because we have very few desi friends. My husband (born and raised in India) actually has very little interest in his community, his traditions, etc. If it weren't for me, I don't think we would have even had a wedding in India, and we definitely wouldn't be eating Indian food all the time :)

He has the attitude that he came to the US to meet people from other cultures and that's what he's interested in doing. Now that we are in France, it's the same thing. We have a few desi friends, but mostly they're friendships I have cultivated. And, while he may sometimes like hanging out with some of his fellow desi students, when we were living in the US I couldn't have dragged him anywhere within a mile radius of the Maharashtrian community events like the holiday celebrations, etc, in our city. He had zero interest in going to them, as he felt most of the people there were living in their own "Indian" bubble in the US and refused to branch out or become friends with Americans (again, these are his words, not mine, so please don't jump all over me for writing that).

My husband and I have no close indian friends….some accaintances, but no indian friends here.  My husband grew up in India and has been here only a couple of years.  We live in a very diverse city, but it seems 85% of the Indians around are Punjabi's and my husband has little (maybe nothing?) in common with them.  He is from South India and ofcourse there is the whole North vs South thing.  We did find one grocer that was Telugu, and there is a Tamil association in town (so there must be a bunch of them living here) but my husband isn't Tamil and unfortunatly his group is the smallest South Asian group in Canada (apparently most settle in the US or Middle East). 

Most of our friends are South east Asian–Hong Kong, Malaysia, Laos, etc or European…actually very few born and bred Canadian's! LOL  My family is European, so its even strange for me to hear about how "Canadian families" run.  My husband doesn't mind, nor does he seek out desi friends.  He doesn't want to be stereotyped as being a "typical Indian", so it may be part of the reason…he wants to be seen as Canadian.  He has never taken a keen interest in his culture and could live without all the Indian hype (no bollywood, no Indian clothes, no festivals, etc).  The only thing he enjoys are food and chatting up the family back home.