1. You are a grown adult and there is a heavy, uncomfortable silence in the room when you’re watching television with your parents and ads for condoms or sanitary pads come up.
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25 Signs You Were Born and Raised in India
3. When your uncle from Indore is in trouble and asks for a loan, the first thing that goes through your mind is wonder if you will be a pig in your next birth if you refuse.
4. You pay 5,000 rupees for that midnight blue Anarkali at Shopper’s Stop, yet you haggle with the vegetable vendor for free coriander and chilies.
5. You hadn’t heard of yoga the first time Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke of it — but whether or not you practice it is a different matter altogether.
6. You swell with pride at the mention of the Taj Mahal, even if you’ve only seen it in the ‘Times of India.’
7. You’re not surprised to see a cow standing without a care in the middle of the road. Not only do you drive past carefully, you also seek its blessings before continuing the journey.
8. You believe love always wins — ‘Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge’ and ‘Jab We ‘Met’ are proof enough.
9. Your life is thrown out of whack when maid ‘Shanta bai’ who not only does vessels and cleaning but also keeps you updated on what’s happening in the Gupta household, doesn’t turn up.
10. You have by far the biggest suitcases of anyone you see on international trips.
11. You recently told a total stranger on the train why you were still not married at 25 and what you planned to do with your life.
12. You don’t talk about the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to legalize same-sex weddings because movies like ‘Unfreedom’ and ‘My brother Nikhil’ got banned before you could even think of watching them.
13. Your mother cannot contemplate a life without home-cooked ‘idli-sambhar’ or ‘rajma-chaaval’ — if you’re a man, it’s part of the reason you get married. If you’re a woman, you learn to cook.
14. You are proud that ‘misal pav‘ was recently declared the ‘tastiest vegetarian dish in the world’ by the Foodie Hub Global Awards. You’re not even from Maharashtra, so you don’t even know what it tastes like. So what?
15. You use the head nod to say ‘yes,’ ‘no,’ ‘maybe,’ ‘what,’ ‘whatever.’ And you expect people to know exactly what you mean.
16. You never moved out of your parents’ house, even after you got married.
17. You are sure that a marriage is a once-in-a-lifetime-event. What you are not sure about is if you love (or even like) Mrs. Iyer’s daughter who has been chosen as your bride by the family.
18. You still haven’t forgotten the Italian risotto, Mexican tortillas, 10 kinds of sweets and 15 kinds of ice creams that were served at the Malvankar wedding.
19. Your cousins flaunt their lehengas at weddings but can’t do without their regular jeans in college. You have a lot of cousins.
20. You wake up to a cup of tea made the same way each day — with lots of milk, sugar and ginger/cardamom/chai masala.
21. Amazon India’s ‘aur dikhao’ ad with the Sikh kid reminds you of the time when you were asked to dance for the benefit of Mr. and Mrs. Shah who were chomping on ‘gulab jamuns’ that you were not allowed to touch until the guests left.
22. You stare a lot and you don’t know why it makes people, particularly foreigners, uncomfortable.
23. You don’t realize how much celebrating Holi and Diwali mean to you until you leave the country.
24. You start bawling when you hear Lata Mangeshkar’s songs at your Gujarati hairdresser’s salon in Toronto.
25. For the life of you, you can’t understand why anyone would ever buy kiwi fruit when they can have mango. 
