South Asian Heritage Month

Vedant's Story

One-Way Ticket, Three Degrees, and a Dream

When I boarded that one-way flight from Kolkata eight years ago, I came armed with:
• £1000 in my bank account,
• A student visa more fragile than my confidence,
• A suitcase of instant noodles,
• And a dream so gloriously untested it could’ve been written in movies.

The plan was bold: study PPE at Warwick, become a philosopher–economist–global saviour, and definitely figure out how to cook rice.

The reality? Less Nobel Prize, more supermarket night shift. But if there’s one thing a South Asian upbringing prepares you for, it’s how to never fall apart — even when you fall short. Especially when you’re doing it while hearing about someone else’s kid who just got into medical school.

Match Report: The Opening Overs

Fresh off the plane, I walked into lectures by day and worked in petrol stations by night. I was stacking Doritos with one hand and highlighting Hobbes with the other. Somewhere between caffeine highs and curry-stained lecture notes, I decided two subjects  weren’t enough. So I got a third.
Three subjects. Three jobs. One half-eaten curry in the fridge that quietly judged my life choices.

But this wasn’t a breakdown — this was business as usual. I grew up watching my parents run full-time jobs and family businesses like it was second nature. My grandfather served in the military. My mother, Jesuit-schooled, ran circles around life’s chaos. In our world, you don’t wait for things to get easier — you just get better at doing them hard.

And, in case you’re not a doctor, engineer or lawyer — you overcompensate. So I triple-majored. Just to keep the family WhatsApp group mildly impressed.

The COVID Collapse: Innings Interrupted

Then came COVID. A year of momentum turned into a screeching halt. Graduation on Zoom. Master's applications delayed. Job rejections arriving faster than my WiFi could buffer.
I was thousands of miles from home — stuck, broke, and briefly out of hope.

But again, I leaned into what my culture taught me: Pain isn’t an endpoint — it’s a comma.
You cry (privately), adapt (publicly), and you get on with it. I hit reset, enrolled for my Master’s, and started over — not with a cinematic speech, but with the quiet, relentless grind we’re raised to believe in.

The Second Innings: A Grit-Fueled Rebuild

I worked through my Master’s — part-time jobs, freelance tutoring, rewriting my CV so many times it needed a table of contents. My friends joked I never slept. They weren’t wrong. But this wasn’t hustle for hustle’s sake — it was heritage. 

In South Asian homes, hard work isn’t desperation. It’s dignity. It’s the silent way we honour the sacrifices of those who came before us. It’s our form of gratitude. of belief, of keeping pace with cousins who post their CAT scores with fireworks emojis.  It’s also why we push forward — because our dreams don’t fly solo. They drag a few family expectations in their luggage.

Breakthrough Moment: Quiet Victory

After dozens of rejections, and a life-saving Pret subscription, I finally got the call: a graduate role at Greystar.

No montage. No rousing soundtrack. Just one long exhale and a phone call to my mum. Her first words?

“Did you say thank you properly?”
That’s South Asian Heritage too.  We celebrate wins quietly, respectfully and then immediately explain what REPE is to you uncle who still wishes you’d done engineering.

What South Asian Heritage Means to Me

It’s not a costume I wear once a year. It’s how I show up.
In how I overprepare.
In how I treat education like a gift, not a given.
In how I carry the legacy of parents and grandparents like it’s a trust fund of resilience — one I’m duty-bound to grow. 

My culture didn’t just influence me. It carried me.

Final Scorecard
• Four degrees
• One graduate job
• Dozens of unpaid internships and emotional spreadsheets
• Several over-boiled kettles worth of life lessons

Still hungry. Still foolish. Still proud.