Written by Alok Das
Rooting While Foreign
Dear Alok,
You write about rooting.
About working, loving, contributing, building community, doing everything roots are supposed to do, and yet remaining foreign. About making a home that can still feel deferred, conditional, always one document away from vanishing.
I want you to stay with that contradiction because perhaps this is one of the strangest conditions of being an international student: you can become deeply embedded in a place while being institutionally reminded that your presence is temporary. You can belong and still be denied belonging. You can call somewhere home while knowing that the state reserves the right to call it something else.
But be cautious, Alok. Not everyone arrives in this condition in the same way. Leaving home with the genuine intention of returning can itself be a privilege. International students are not one class, one story, or one relationship to mobility. Some arrive carrying considerable economic, social, and cultural capital. Others arrive having gathered nearly everything their families possess around the possibility of a different future.
Canada’s International Student Program was, in many ways, built around the first kind of mobility—the internationally mobile student with enough resources to study temporarily and leave. But your own journey has brought you close to very different stories.
You have met young people for whom international education is not simply education abroad. It is an enormous wager. Families sell things. Parents borrow. Siblings wait. Students work exhausting hours. People cross oceans carrying dreams wildly disproportionate to the resources available to them.
And then they encounter an educational apparatus remarkably skilled at privileging those already privileged while extracting from those who arrive with fewer resources and an astonishing capacity to sacrifice for the possibility of another life. Remember that when you write about rooting. Because some people are not merely trying to study here. They are desperately trying to grow roots in difficult soil.
You know this because you have sat beside them. You are one of them. Perhaps that is why one of the hardest parts of your work has become watching truly fine young people suffer because of systemic nonsense. Sometimes it feels harder than attending funerals. And you know funerals. At a funeral, at least, grief has somewhere to go. You mourn. You pray in whatever way you have learned. You remember. You send love toward the dead whenever they return to your mind. Somehow, eventually, grief learns to live beside you.
But there is no funeral for systemic nonsense. Federal regulations. Provincial regulations. Institutional regulations. Academic bureaucracy. We give them respectable names: policy, procedure, eligibility, compliance, requirements. For a young person, those words can mean something very different. Fear. Lost time. Thousands of dollars. A family disappointed. A future suspended. A dream suddenly placed on hold. Perhaps what hurts you most is knowing how much of this suffering is avoidable. Someone designs the system. Someone interprets it. Someone maintains it. Someone benefits from it. And someone with considerably less power carries its consequences.
Do not misunderstand me, Alok. Systems are not inhabited only by cruel people. There are people inside universities, governments, classrooms, student services, community organizations, and bureaucracies who fight every day for something more just. You have met them. You have worked beside them. Sometimes they are the reason you can continue doing this work at all. But the list of things requiring repair is long. Very long.
And then the Canadian government decided that international students could become convenient explanations for crises produced through decades of inadequate public investment. Housing. Healthcare. Infrastructure. Institutional financing. Complex structural failures were translated into a much simpler political story. According to those who brought you here, there are too many international students. And regulatory change arrived like a cannon. From a distance, governments called it reform. From where you were sitting, you watched dreams collapse. Young people who had already begun imagining home in this complicated land suddenly discovered again how conditional that home was. So you responded in the way you knew.
You worked harder. You tried to be more present with students. You tried to answer one more message. You tried to find one more possibility hidden somewhere inside the regulations. You tried to become a little kinder—to students, to colleagues, and occasionally, when you remembered, to yourself. But rage has a strange metabolism. Carry it long enough and sometimes it becomes pain. And eventually you found yourself asking: What is the point of even trying? Why not walk away? Tonight, Alok, you looked at the screen and could not write. So you played Lalon. And you cried. Perhaps you needed to.
Then Lalon sang:
অনন্ত রূপ সৃষ্টি করলেন সাঁই
শুনি মানবরূপের উত্তম কিছুই নাই।
দেব দেবতাগণ করে আরাধন
জন্ম নিতে মানবে।
Of all the infinite forms Sai created, I hear there is nothing greater than the human form. Even gods and goddesses worship for the chance to be born human.
And then:
কত ভাগ্যের ফলে না জানি
পেয়েছ এই মানব তরণী।
বেয়ে যাও ত্বরায় তরী সুধারায়
যেন ভরা না ডোবে।।
Who knows through what extraordinary fortune you received this human boat. Row it. Row while you can. Do not let this precious, fully laden boat sink.
Maybe this is what you needed to hear. You can walk away from academia. You can walk away from another paper. Another citation. Another conference. Another argument carefully packaged for institutions that sometimes know how to turn resistance itself into professional currency.
You can walk away from all of that. But you cannot walk away from being human. And perhaps that is what Lalon came to remind you tonight. The point was never to conquer the system. Perhaps the point was never even to reach some imagined shore where justice had finally been completed. Perhaps the work is smaller and more enormous than that. Sai has given this মানব তরণী—this human boat. So row.
Row toward another human being. Row toward the student sitting across from you whose future has become a paragraph in a regulation. Row toward the colleague quietly resisting from inside the institution. Row toward the communities teaching one another how to belong when the state has made belonging conditional. Row when you are angry. Row when you are joyful. Row when you are tired. And when you cannot row, perhaps allow someone who loves you to hold the oar for a while. Resistance does not require you to drown.
Lalon ends:
এবার ঠকলে আর না দেখি কিনার
অধীন লালন কয় কাতর ভাবে।।
If I lose this chance now, Lalon says in anguish, I do not see another shore.
Most days, Alok, you still do not know where the shore is. That is all right. You are still angry. You are still hurting. Some nights, you are still crying. But tomorrow you will stand again beside the people for whom you chose this field in the first place. Not because you believe you can save them. Not because you believe institutions will suddenly become just. And certainly not because suffering makes resistance noble. You stand because their humanity encounters yours.
Maybe solidarity begins there. Maybe belonging begins there too—not with the state’s permission, not with a document, not with the fantasy that roots become legitimate only when an institution recognizes them, but in the stubborn, relational work of making life possible with and for one another. So, dear Alok, when the system makes you wonder whether any of this matters, remember the boat. You do not need to know where the shore is. For now, keep rowing. And remember: you are allowed to look at the sky while you do.
With lots of love,
Alok
About the author:
Alok Das is author’s pseudonym. Author is based in Canada and a doctoral candidate and an international student advisor in a comprehensive university in Atlantic Canada.