Midterms and Mid-Autumn: Students Balancing Books and Festivals

Disha Kotagiri

Oct 09 2025

<div class='bc_element' id='bc_element1' style='width:auto;padding:5px;max-height:100%;'> For many Indian students abroad, October arrives with a double weight. In the United States, it marks the midterm season, when libraries are open late and exams compress weeks of anxiety into a few hours of recall. But October is also when the Hindu calendar lights up with festivals: Navratri, Dussehra, Diwali just around the corner. The immigrant child finds themselves caught between two calendars that refuse to align—the academic one that determines grades and futures, and the ritual one that insists on continuity with a past that is half a world away. The tension is not just about scheduling but about identity. Midterms measure assimilation: they test whether you have mastered the language of multiple-choice exams, the format of American pedagogy, the ability to prioritise productivity over pause. Festivals measure inheritance: whether you remember to dress in borrowed finery, whether you know the words of the aarti, whether you can still locate joy in the familiar rhythms of claps and chants. Both are demanding, and both claim legitimacy over your time. In dormitories across New Jersey, Michigan, or California, this tension plays out in subtle ways. A student packs flashcards into her handbag before heading to a Navratri night, sneaking in study between rounds of garba. Another negotiates with his parents over a WhatsApp call, promising to attend the Sunday puja even though an engineering exam looms on Monday morning. Festivals in diaspora are rarely leisurely; they are sandwiched between assignments, their celebration shaped by guilt—guilt at not studying enough, guilt at not showing up enough for tradition. The irony is that in India, October festivals often collided with school or university exams too. But there, the collision felt communal; entire families strategised around it, neighbours wished each other luck, the festival noise itself became a backdrop for cramming. Abroad, the collision feels isolating. Professors do not pause for Navratri, and classmates are often unaware of Dussehra. The student toggles between two realities in which each calendar is invisible to the other. There is a deeper philosophical question embedded here about what it means to carry a festival into a context that does not recognise it. For the diaspora student, the festival becomes more than ritual—it becomes assertion. To show up in traditional clothes, to insist on carving out an evening for prayer or dance, is to remind oneself and one’s peers that belonging cannot be measured only in grades or CV lines. The festival is no longer just about gods or victories; it is about insisting that joy itself deserves a place alongside ambition. Yet this assertion is fragile. Many students confess that they experience festivals abroad as fragmented. The Navratri night ends early, the food is catered and reheated, the puja feels rushed so everyone can return to study. Compared to the immersive environment of India, it feels like a diluted version, a sketch of something fuller. Some even choose to skip it altogether, reasoning that festivals can wait but GPA cannot. But what these skipped nights reveal is not apathy but the pressure of translation—how much harder it is to sustain a ritual when it has to compete with the unrelenting cadence of another culture’s priorities. At the same time, there is invention. Students transform their dorm rooms into temporary shrines, lighting tea candles in place of diyas, playing garba songs on Bluetooth speakers, folding festival into the cracks of their academic lives. These acts are small, almost invisible to outsiders, but they hold symbolic weight. They suggest that tradition survives not only in grand celebrations but in improvised gestures, in the determination to carve meaning out of scarcity. The juxtaposition of midterms and mid-autumn rituals also highlights a broader truth about migration: that life abroad is rarely a clean substitution of one system for another. Instead, it is a constant negotiation, an overlapping of calendars, expectations, and values. Students in particular embody this overlap most acutely, because their lives are defined by measurement. Exams measure competence; festivals measure continuity; both seem to demand proof. To balance them is not simply to manage time but to reconcile two modes of belonging—academic legitimacy and cultural inheritance. In a sense, the diaspora student’s October is a microcosm of the immigrant condition itself. Migration rarely allows for singular identities; one is always juggling, always translating. The midterm exam and the festival thali sit side by side on the desk, both symbols of futures being written, one in grades and one in memory. And perhaps the lesson here is that survival abroad depends less on resolving the conflict than on learning to live within it, to accept that belonging will always be partial, layered, and incomplete. Philosophers of ritual often note that festivals serve two purposes: to collapse time into continuity, and to offer respite from the everyday. In diaspora, they often fail at the second but succeed at the first. They cannot always offer respite—students still return to their assignments—but they can offer continuity. The act of dancing garba in a crowded gym or lighting a lamp in a dormitory might not erase the stress of exams, but it affirms that identity is not wholly swallowed by circumstance. It reminds the student that they are tethered to more than their GPA. The beauty of this juxtaposition is that it also forces creativity. A student might weave a paper Durga between lecture notes, or invite non-Indian friends to a Dussehra gathering as a way of explaining themselves without words. In these improvisations, the festival becomes not a burden but a bridge, a way of connecting across difference. If exams measure survival in the host culture, festivals measure survival of the self. The real success lies not in acing one or attending the other, but in holding both in tension without surrendering either. In the end, October abroad is not only about books or gods. It is about the stubbornness of joy in the face of pressure, the insistence that identity is not a zero-sum game. A student who carries flashcards into a garba night is not failing either tradition or education; she is embodying the truth of diaspora, which is never about perfect balance but about constant, imperfect negotiation. To dance for an hour and then return to study is not compromise—it is testament. It says: we can carry more than one calendar, more than one demand, more than one future. </div>

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