By Manpreet Singh
“Oh, so you have a Schengen passport!”, this is what I hear most of the time whenever I tell my colleagues where I am from. Sometimes, I even hear this from guests, mostly Arab or Indian ones. Because of the red passport, it is common for people here to think that you have a greater status than the rest. I’ve noticed changes in people’s faces before and after knowing that I am from the Schengen area. They put tags based on stereotypes on you such as the ones I will be talking about in the following.
Growing up in Belgium, I never realized how lucky I was to be born and raised there as an Indian. My parents always told us that we should be thankful for where we are today because not everyone can get here easily (from India). The realization that I indeed should be thankful started once I reached Dubai. The first thing I got told once I got dropped off from the airport to the hotel is: “Oh you have the red passport, lucky you!”. At that time, I didn’t realize how big of a deal it was for them.
The days were passing, I was meeting new people, and this sentence was getting repeated by a lot of them. They would also say “You’re not Indian, you are European. Her currency is not like ours; she is using Euros, so she is for sure super rich.” As a joke, many would also ask me to take them along in my suitcase before I go back home from my internship. This not only happens with my colleagues but also with some guests that I checked-in. After introducing myself, some of them will ask me where I am from. I would answer then that my parents are from India, but that I was brought up in Belgium, most of them always find it very fascinating for some reason.
Another situation that I encountered a lot is that my Indian colleagues think that I can’t speak Hindi and that I don’t know anything regarding my parents’ culture. At the beginning, I would speak in English with everyone as I didn’t ever really have Indian colleagues in my life. With time, I saw that many of them are more comfortable speaking in Hindi, so I started doing the same. People were shocked that I was able to speak it fluently. They were also surprised to see that I knew more than they thought about Indian culture. They were in fact happy to see that despite where I was born, I was still somehow connected to my roots.
At the end of the day, I am just glad that they all accepted me and see me more as one of them, which is I would say a “typical Indian girl”. They still joke sometimes about the fact that I’m “too European” when I make any slight mistake but in a very friendly way. I am thankful to have met those people.