Profile: Janani Subramanian

JANANI SUBRAMANIAN is a long way from home. But for her, a new freshman at Roger Williams University, it doesn’t feel all too different.

Subramanian doesn’t look too out of place, walking around campus with her caramel skin and jet black locks, but her Indian accent is the real teller. She speaks impeccable English (better than some Americans I know), but her pronunciation is elegantly mixed with the traces of Hindi she has spoken since birth.

Subramanian is very comfortable speaking to others regardless of her accent, however. A natural extrovert, she will strike up a conversation with anyone, anywhere. So it only seemed natural that Subramanian would choose to study Communications and Theatre in college, due to her outgoing nature. She always knew she would study the arts in America, considering the poor college choices in India.

“For the arts,” Subramanian explains, “the infrastructure [in India] is not that great. [The schools] more stereotypically driven by either being a doctor or an engineer, so the colleges for the arts are pretty nonexistent.”

Although Subramanian lives in an apartment in Bangalore, a city in Karnataka, India, she feels very comfortable in the United States. “I wasn’t nervous about coming here at all,” she says.

This might be due to the fact that Subramanian’s parents are no strangers to American culture. They lived in Michigan for about 10 years before moving back to India, due the father’s job, when their daughter was 3 years old. This prompted them to become less conservative parents, at least compared to Indian culture.

“Culture-wise, Indians are more conservative than Americans are,” Subramanian explains. While many of her friends in India were governed by very strict parents, she had a very close relationship with her parents, and was able to talk about almost anything. The majority of her female friends were not even allowed to be friends with the opposite sex, and a few of those will even receive arranged marriages in the future.

Subramanian did not have to deal with these issues growing up. Her parents let her befriend who she wanted and even let her date freely, something many parents in India wouldn’t dream of doing. However, she doesn’t see her life in India as that much different than her friends’ lives in America. Subramanian and her friends would “do normal things together,” such as going to movies, spending time together and going to clubs, so she doesn’t see much reason to feel like an outsider.

For Janani Subramanian, coming to school in America seemed like the logical and, surprisingly, comfortable decision to make, due to her upbringing. Though it wasn’t very difficult in the first place, she adapts more and more to the American lifestyle as the days go by, just like her parents did over 25 years ago.

“My parents are pretty cool,” Subramanian explains, “Because they have more perspective of the world, I guess.”