“No culture can live if it attempts to be exclusive”
       — Mahatma Gandhi

I first arrived in India expecting it to be a cousin, culturally and socially, to my country of birth, Iran. Although it is often claimed that the histories of the two countries are intertwined, the reality is different — the two cultures are more different than similar and where they have overlapped, the traffic has been all one-way, Iran failing to match India’s ability to borrow and learn from the exchange. Iran has suffered and continues to suffer from its inability to absorb the often broader imagination, depth and variety of Indian culture and its embrace of the worlds available to us. I have come to this understanding not through intellectual study — it is the outcome of a two-decade experience of trying to find a way to tie the pieces together into a workable whole. In fact, a significant part of the last 20 years of my life has been shaped by the differences and similarities between the two cultures and my sometimes mistaken expectation of how easy it would be to carve out a space for myself between the two. I have not always been successful.