A Brave New World

This weekend my family and I dropped my sister, Sarah, off at The University of Connecticut, where she would be attending college for the next four years. It turns out that for the past two weeks it has been known to us that Sarah would be dorming with an Indian roommate that grew up in a small town outside of Hartford.

I was excited about sharing the cultural “encounter” between my sister and her roommate before it even happened, I was expecting some serious juxtaposition. My sister, for lack of a better phrase is a wild child. She’s a social butterfly. To put it bluntly, she likes to party. My sister was afraid that her new roommate would be shy, dare I say, even introverted after growing up in a small town and influenced by a more reserved culture, than say Queens NY. When my sister addressed her concerns to me I told her that she was just stereotyping and that you can’t judge a person until you meet them, but in my head I couldn’t help but imagine the cultural gap that might divide my sister from her new roommate.

When the inescapable encounter finally occurred it was more or less uneventful. Each set of parents frantically made sure their daughters had everything they needed before the two young women were inevitably left with only each other. It wasn’t their differences that I saw, rather, it was the bond between them as they entered into a brave new world (college).