In this special episode, author Cherie Dost interviewed me and I got to share my life story and how all my experiences have shaped who I am and why I chose to start CulturallyOurs.
Today’s episode of Culturally Ours was a bit different. The tables were turned this time, and I was suddenly the subject. I am always so inspired by my guests who so generously share their story, so I thought it was only fair to add my own story to the larger tapestry and conversation.
My friend Cherie Dost, an award-winning poet, writer and radio host, interviewed me. We covered everything from my early memories, the twists and turns on my path, to my creative, full life today, with my Indian husband and our children in the suburbs of Chicago.
Meet your host, Karthika Gupta
Cherie Dost: Karthika, thank you so much for having me here. I’m so excited to learn more about your story and your inspiration for creating CulturallyOurs
Karthika Gupta: Absolutely! I am so excited to be here with you today.
Cherie Dost: So let’s start with your growing up in Bombay. What was that like? What was your family like?
Karthika Gupta: Oh, I had a great time. I’m from Bombay. Bombay is kind of the western part of India and I have an older sister and so it’s just the two of us, my dad and my mom. For a long time it was just the four of us. And then my sister, who is actually eight years older to me, moved away just around the time that I was in my teens and my dad to moved to Malaysia, he worked for a company there for about 20 years. So for a good part of me growing up it was just my mom and me and we shared a beautiful relationship. I’m very close to my mom and my sister too. We kind of moved from four of us to two and a lot of good, good memories. I’ve had a great childhood and a great life and I’m happy.
Cherie Dost: What are some of your most vivid memories? What brings you back to India? To Bombay? To your childhood?
Karthika Gupta: Totally. I have a couple. Growing up in Bombay, Bombay has these crazy monsoons that we get. I mean it’s just like torrential rain and I remember instances where it rains so much that the schools got out early and the buses couldn’t get by and so parents had to go pick up their kids. So I remember waddling in knee deep water with my Dad holding his hand and getting home, so the rains always brings that out for me. Even here, when it’s l pouring, I just always go back to those times in India, growing up with the rains and having all those nostalgic memories with my parents.
Karthika Gupta: And Chai. I think any Indian can attest that Chai is an integral part of our lives. It’s more than just a drink of choice, it’s like a social activity. I remember in the mornings enjoying a cup of Chai with my mom. My mom was a teacher and she would get up really early in the morning to go to work and that would be our thing. We would share a cup of tea. Then coming back home from school or college. I started having tea pretty young. My kids haven’t yet, but you know, in India it’s a different story. So yea, the tea and the rains have a lot of meaning and memories for me.
Cherie Dost: Well, I love the sense of both of those. I feel right now like it’s raining outside and I can smell the Chai between us.
Karthika Gupta: Yes, and Indian child is very different from just a tea bag. We have milk and we have sugar and we have spices like ginger chai and even like cardommen and it’s just the rain and the tea together make a beautiful combination.
Cherie Dost: Oh, fantastic. So what were some of your challenges when you lived in Bombay?
Karthika Gupta: Wow. So Bombay is a cosmopolitan city and it’s a city of a lot of people, so growing up, even though our family was a family of four, I always had so many neighbors and friends and everybody, so society is a huge part of life in Bombay and you’ve got to get used to it. Again, with us, when the doors closed, it was just the four of us, but when the doors open, it’s like this sea of people who are in every part of your life. So it’s good and it’s also a little challenging at times because you just don’t have parents to guide you. You have your aunts, your uncles, your neighbors, your friends; all these people who live in the same community, they feel like they are a part of your life so they want to be involved. That can be a little challenging if it’s not something that you’re used to. So I would say that, but I mean other than that, I have no complaints. I’ve had a beautiful, beautiful life. I do miss my parents a lot, but you know, such is life.
Cherie Dost: So what made you decide to leave?
Karthika Gupta: Well, education was and still is a huge part of my life. My dad was a mathematician, a brilliant, brilliant person. My mom was a teacher, a math and physics teacher for high school. My sister was always first and second in school, so the emphasis was a lot on education even before we kind of decided what we wanted to do in life. My parents would say, okay, think about postgraduate, think about doctorate because that’s something that was very important to us. So when my sister left to come to the states for her master’s degree, it was sort of a given that, I would too. And she was here, my parents were in Malaysia, so I had nobody in India anymore.
Cherie Dost: And where did you go to school here?
Karthika Gupta: I went to school at Illinois State University. Go ISU! I had a fantastic experience there. It was a little bit of a culture shock because again, coming from Bombay with millions of people and then coming into little small town America where everybody is so friendly and everybody wants to have a conversation chat with you. It did initially take me by surprise and I was like, why are you talking to me? What do you want from me? Are you going to Mug me? I loved that experience, it’s just a great school and great number of people.
Cherie Dost: What really struck you about the new culture that you were entering?
Karthika Gupta: A lot of things. I mean, the culture in India is somewhat inclusive, right? I mean everybody around you. And I had nobody when I came here. So, it took me a little bit to sort of get my bearings right and get kind of ingrained in the American way of doing things. You know, some of our other guests have said that things like getting a driver’s license, getting a phone connection, figuring out how the Internet works. Suddenly I’m in charge of making my own food and I’m washing my own laundry. I think the individualistic approach to life at that point was something that took me a little bit getting used to because that was never life back in India.
Cherie Dost: I would imagine that it was a culture shock to to feel, well, “who am I?” once you get to a place that’s foreign. So how do you re-establish that sense of who you are?
Karthika Gupta: ISU actually has a great program and I think a lot of the other schools do as well, especially for international students, where they connect you with a host family. So it’s an American family that is interested in a particular country or a culture and host students. I had a host family and actually my husband who also came to school here had a host family and for whatever reason I connected well with my husband’s family so we joke that they got to a two for one bargain. Ed and Barb were such beautiful souls in trying to make sure that we felt at home and we didn’t miss our families and parents. They would host us for Thanksgiving and explain the concept of Thanksgiving and Christmas and all that. I mean, we knew what it was, but we had never really actively celebrated it. So by helping people like me get hands-on with American culture, I think that really helped me navigate and soothe the feelings of “What am I doing here?”, “Who am I?”, “how do I fit in?”. All those questions. They were so open and willing to communicate.
Cherie Dost: That’s so key because everywhere you go you need to find your new family and new friends.
Karthika Gupta: Yes, exactly. It’s a lonely world out there.
Cherie Dost: Is that how you met your husband? at the university?
Karthika Gupta: No. My husband, Anuj and I actually know each other from India. We were what you can call high school sweethearts. We didn’t date in high school. I think after high school is when we started dating and when I came here we didn’t know where things would go, so I mean we were pretty set in what we wanted to do in life, but eventually he did manage to come here as well. He came to ISU, being a school that was so open to international students and there was a great group of friends and even teachers and mentors. So we went to school together and eventually it married. It worked out.
Cherie Dost: What did you study?
Karthika Gupta: I’m a total geek. I have a master’s degree in computer science. I actually have an undergraduate degree in computer science from India, so computers was something that I was interested in and passionate about. And so I ended up getting a master’s degree from ISU. It was great because like I said, education and the technology really interested me at that time. And so I felt like this is where I belong, this is something that I can see myself doing for a long time.
Cherie Dost: Yeah. So at some point there was a switch though. You made a professional switch to photography. Can you tell us how that came about?
Karthika Gupta: Sure. After my master’s I ended up going back to school and getting an MBA from the University of Chicago. I was working in corporate and I actually really loved my job. I had a wonderful experience working for Citibank, but I always felt like there was some part of me that was missing. I come from a very creative family. My mom is a painter and an artist. She’s had work commissioned by schools. My sister is also very artistic. She does quilting and she does all sorts of crazy stuff. She has a masters in finance, so very right and left brain of balanced and I always felt like I was not the creative one. I could not paint, I couldn’t draw for the life of me. Then once I had my kids, I just had this need to document with the camera and pictures. We had a camera growing up, but it was never like a core part of our culture, but here it was a way for me to connect with my family back home because everybody would say, okay, send us pictures of the kids, you know, what are they doing this month and how is you, my son, how is he growing? And so I started getting more and more involved in photography and the more I did it, the more I liked it. And then the typical geek in me made me wondered “how does this work?” I want to figure it out the technical aspect of it has lighting and all of that stuff. So long story short, I taught myself photography and I really thought that was a way for me to balance it out, to kind of become my mom’s daughter in being that creative person as well. So I love it now. I love it because, again, it helps me balance out my technical, nerdy brain with my creative side. I truly believe everybody has a creative side. We all express it in very different ways and for me, it’s photography.
Cherie Dost: So it really sounds like your move to the states brought a couple of changes in you out from inside of you. Right? One is the embracing of photography and the documenting, but the other is accepting yourself as an artist.
Karthika Gupta: Yes. I feel like we have all these pieces in us, even from a cultural standpoint, right? I mean, for a long time I’ve been here for almost now half my life, so half my life in India and half my life here. I probably just aged myself, but that’s okay. For a long time I kind of was trying to figure out where I fit in. Who am I? Am I Indian? Am I American? Am I a mix of both? And now finally I realized that I am a mix of both. Who I am and where I’m from is such a core part of my being, but also who I am now and where I am here. It’s given me opportunities, opportunities like this which I wouldn’t have dreamed of doing back home. So I think you come to your own at your own time and pace and place. You have to walk that path of life to sort of understand where you’re going. Right. I mean, not to get too philosophical, but I think about it and I had to experience all these things. I had to experience the technical side so that I could go into the creative side with that point of view and that framework and do now what I want to do.
Cherie Dost: You talked about your mother and how you are really close with your mother and she’s an artist, and now you have children. And so your children are also part of bringing your worlds together here. So do you think about doing that for them in bringing the cultures together?
Karthika Gupta: Yes, absolutely. Both Anuj and I are from India, so even though from different parts of India, were still Indian and you know, in, in some ways we do kind of make sure that our children have that I’m Indianness in them. We chose pretty traditional Indian names. They don’t learn Indian culture, like dance or music or anything like that, but they’re very close to their grandparents. We go home almost every year. For us, that’s a big part of their lifestyle because they have a family back home in India and I don’t want them to not know that. We’ve traveled extensively in India because I want to expose them to life there, which is very different from life here. So I feel like in these subtle and direct ways, I can make sure that they know who they are. In some cases I probably have failed because my kids don’t speak Hindi because we don’t speak Hindi at home, but they can understand because we make sure that when they speak to their grandparents they use the native language, so they understand the conversation, they probably just can’t speak it, which is okay I think.
Cherie Dost: When you go to India with your children, do you see it sort of anew through their eyes?
Karthika Gupta: Oh absolutely. So many things, even things that I take for granted and have not paid too much attention to, I know when the kids go and they’re like, “oh, is this how it’s done?” In India we have autos which are like a three wheeler, they don’t have a door, you just enter in and enter out. So when my kids went for the first time, they were thrilled because they were like no car seat, pretty much dangled their hands and legs outside. I was so happy to experience that from their eyes. And for me it was just an auto is an auto as an auto, no big deal, right? I’ve taken up half of my life, but when they experienced it, it was just looking at it from a different perspective from those innocent childlike eyes. There was a great. They love it too. They have a lot of family still back home, so it’s always great to go back.
Cherie Dost: That’s wonderful. So another thing that you do are retreats for cultural entrepreneurs who want to be immersed and Indian culture. How did that start?
Karthika Gupta: The past few years I’ve been going back to India a lot for one reason or the other and through my trips what I realized was that a lot of people go to India, but we sort of see the same typical things, the touristy things. But there’s so much more to India. There’s so much happening in terms of social entrepreneurship, in terms of just technology and innovation. And so I wanted to do something where I could show not only the touristy popular side, but also the real and the authentic side. Our first trip was actually happening in November and we’re taking a group of what I call creative entrepreneurs. Basically they’re business people, but you don’t have to be in business to go. It’s just the creativity comes in where we are meeting with a a non-government organization that actually is working with the rural girls and women in the villages. We are also going to be meeting a women’s cooperative that has been financially successful for 20 years. These people don’t have social media, they don’t have marketing plans and budgets and all of those things, yet they are successful. So how is it that they’re doing that and I think the best way to understand these things is to actually sit down face-to-face. Meet with them on their turf and hear their stories. So that’s, that’s kind of what my premise was for doing these retreats.
Cherie Dost: So it sounds like another way that you bring two worlds together.
Karthika Gupta: Absolutely. I mean we’re in such a beautiful connected world. It’s a shame to not want to experience that. And especially in places that are so different from ours with people that are so different from ours. Right? I mean just talking to people at times, getting their story and getting their perspective adds so much dimension and depth to your own life and your own experience.
Cherie Dost: So you talked about, you know, India being so much more than just the Taj Mahal or the different icons. When, when you take people on these immersive retreats, what do you want them to come away with?
Karthika Gupta: I really want them to understand India from the inside. I mean even the whole premise of this show is to understand people from the inside out, right? Not to look at the superficial, not look at what’s visible, but actually take the time to get, to know people inside, learn what makes them tick. So I kind of want the same thing. As a nation I want these people to understand what is it that makes India tick. I mean, sure, we have our problems, every country does, but there’s also the beautiful side. There’s also the side that’s trying to come up. Experiencing that, experiencing those stories and those narratives so you can get a full holistic picture. It’s not just what you see on TV or what is publicized.
Cherie Dost: So would you ever move back to India?
Karthika Gupta: You know, we’ve, my husband and I have talked about this a lot. The answer is sort of a yes and a no, right? I mean for me India is an integral part of life and so I feel like no matter where I am, I have that India coming along with me sitting right next to me being a part of me. Of course, if I could go back and be with my family, I absolutely will, so who knows. Maybe the situation comes where we do get a chance to and I might, but I’m happy here as well because I feel like I’ve managed to figure out how to make myself happy by combining my two worlds. I miss India of course, because of the memories and because of the people, but I don’t miss that culture because I’ve put my own spin to it and made sure that my life and my family experience that.
Cherie Dost: What’s your favorite thing about living in America?
Karthika Gupta: Maybe I should have my kids answer that. In all honesty, it’s the opportunities that I’ve had, the people that I’ve met and where my life has taken me is is pretty incredible. I don’t think I would’ve had those opportunities , so I definitely appreciate where I am now and it’s helping me figure out where my life is going to go and what I’m going to do next. I’m a happy person.
Cherie Dost: That’s wonderful. You said you lived half your life in India and half your life here and you talk about being in such a good place right now, but I’m thinking of you as a college student in a little town and feeling like, who do I connect with? so that whole journey from that point to now. I’m so glad that you feel you’re in this great space.
Karthika Gupta: Yeah. And surely it’s life. It’s life and the experiences that we have. I often hear a lot of like younger people getting into business or into photography. I do mentor sometimes and you know, the questions that I get asked is like, “how did you get your big break” or “when can I expect to do this?” And there’s no real formula for anything. You come to a place in your own time. I think you have to experience everything. Had I not experienced that loneliness of being away from everybody, I probably would have had a different path and I wouldn’t be so inspired and motivated to make sure that I do something like this where I can connect people, where you don’t have to feel so lonely if you are not from here. You now know all these other people, you’ve heard all the other stories. So you know, you feel at peace, right? So I think if I had not walked path, I probably wouldn’t be here. My path would be probably different, so I’m happy I did all the struggles and everything, I think such as life.
Cherie Dost: Well, it’s a very empathetic path. All of your experiences you’re using to turn into this wonderful new podcast, CulturallyOurs. Tell us how you were inspired to create CulturallyOurs.
Karthika Gupta: I think a huge part of it is a manifestation of what I have gone through. My cultural experiences, my experiences with trying to make a place for myself, trying to accept who I am and where I come from and how that fits in this bigger sort of spectrum of my life, and I realized that it’s, it’s all about narratives and it’s all about story and it’s how we connect with people. I mean, I love my phone. I won’t lie. I am a geek in terms of technology. I have all the gadgets and stuff, but I really missed that talking. That conversation that, “how are you doing?” while looking at the person and kind of connecting with them, hearing their story. “What was it like for you?” Because when I hear those stories, I kind of realize, okay, this is how my life was or gee, my life was a little different. And so I think when we, when we take the time to understand people, we really appreciate where they’re coming from and we appreciate the life and the path that they have chosen. It’s not about judgment, there’s no political agenda. It’s not, there’s no religious bias, nothing. It’s just purely a conversation because I want to get to know people. You know, I worked in corporate for a long time and then I was working from home and I missed that interaction, and I I was like, let’s do a podcast that’s talks to people from all over the world because interesting people live everywhere.
Cherie Dost: Would you say that is one of the benefits of living in the United States, is that there are so many different cultures and so many people from everywhere?
Karthika Gupta: Absolutely. I mean, even depending on where you live, right? Where I live in Naperville, we have so many countries coming together. We have so much representation. it’s beautiful to see when you walk down the street. I see people from India, I see people from the Middle East and it just feels like a big happy family. You also kind of have some of those fears. I mean, fear is the wrong word. It’s like, no, what am I doing? Or in some, some sort of apprehension. But when you talk to people, I think that apprehension goes away because you now are seeing them on your own, on their own turf and your own turf. Right? At the end of the day, we’re all people. We all the same dreams. We all have the same aspirations. We all want the same things. So why not go together?
Cherie Dost: Yeah, that’s really beautiful. So I’m getting a feeling of what we can expect from CulturallyOurs, but I’ll still ask you what, what kind of stories will we expect to hear?
Karthika Gupta: A big part of CulturallyOurs will be a global. So I want to connect with people from all over the world and I want the listeners to connect with these people. We will have know stories, we will have narratives and it’s not just about personal stories. Maybe it’s a family recipe that we can talk about. Maybe it’s a place that in your hometown that has a lot of meaning for you. And I want to hear that. Lifestyle. Culture. If I could use one word, I would say life because life is all these things, right? It is the culture and the lifestyle and the food and the art and the travel. So having that kind of vision to connect people in terms of life stories and just understand where they’re coming from. Our first season is migration. So we hear stories of people who’ve migrated from one place to the other just like I did. I’ve had a lot of movement in my life so I’m very excited for what’s to come for sure.
Cherie Dost: I have one final questions that I have since you brought up food. We have to talk a little bit about what you’ve miss, what you crave, and what you can find here or make here to fill those cravings?
Karthika Gupta: Well, I have to be completely honest. I’m a terrible cook. I don’t know how my husband and my kids, they kind of just manage by. But for me food is definitely a way to kind of connect with and you know, cultures and stuff. And in Indian culture, we have this thing where we’ll make a dessert, like something sweet to satisfy your sweet tooth. But we do it when you start something new, we cook a sweet and it’s like kind of setting the stage right, if you could call it that. So I am getting excited to cook some sweets for the launch of this podcast. With my Chai. And if it rains then we have we’re all golden
Cherie Dost: That’s fantastic. All of the best of luck to you and all of your guestson CulturallyOurs.
Karthika Gupta: Thank you so much and I’m really excited for this.
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