Ashraya Gupta: "I didn’t encounter average American white people until we moved to Long Island. I was one of three other people who weren’t white in my graduating class. That feeling of being 'foreign' didn’t hit me until I moved here, but also that coincided with middle school starting, so it was like double-dose.

"My brother’s social-studies teacher, in middle school, looked at his name on the attendance roster the first day and was like, 'Man, you really need to buy yourself a vowel.' Now, he talks about this, he can’t figure out if this is just naturally his personality or the personality he’s developed because of being an immigrant, always make them laugh, be a little diffident."

Ashutosh: "We had sent the records from Cincinnati to the school here. So when I got here, he had been put in English as a Second Language. I got into such a rage. Such a rage. I tried to find this person, to say 'Do you even read the files which land on your desk, just because you are unable to pronounce a name, you make assumptions? He is the smartest kid in your school!' I don’t know if that actually took place. But those were the thoughts in my head."

Ashraya: "Things that I should’ve called people out on and chose not to: One of my teachers said something like, 'In the sea of people in the classroom, I was an exotic treat.' It was awful. It was an awful thing to say!"

Ashutosh: "We have no conflict about our identity. We are Indians and we will always be Indians, wherever we go. That will be a problem for the next generation who have a claim to something, but it’s an indirect claim. They don’t really know what it is to be an Indian, though they have had peeks at it. The profound problem — when you ask me what I miss about India — I say what is there is centuries of history. Layer upon layer, it's incorporated into everyday song, language, it’s all around you.

"That is why, now, I’m against globalization! Because everything gets lost. It’s like blending Chinese and Mexican food, perfectly good dinners, ruined by blending them together. The best wines in the world are not produced by mixing them into one jar. You have to let them have their own personality."