No one told us that belonging could sound like confusion.
We were born in Denmark, but the soundtrack of our childhood came from somewhere else — a living room glowing with Bollywood. Our parents arrived in the 70s as guest workers; they built lives from factory shifts and faded postcards, but their hearts never left home.
You wouldn’t believe what a satellite dish meant back then. It wasn’t rebellion — it was memory preservation. When the Danish right called it foreign influence, we knew it as the only signal that reached both sides of our identity. Those melodies from Mumbai weren’t just songs — they were lessons in love, language, and survival.
We grew up between two frequencies: Danish silence and Bollywood sound. And in that static, we found ourselves — half translated, fully human, humming along to a story that still refuses to fade.
Back then, Bollywood was the only mirror that didn’t blur us. It showed faces that looked like ours, people who spoke the same tangled mix of love and duty our parents lived by. For a while, we hid that part of ourselves — lowered the music when Danish friends came over, switched the channel when Shah Rukh Khan danced too loudly. But something changed. The same songs that once made us different now make us whole.
Today, when a remix of an old Kishore Kumar track trends on TikTok or plays in a Copenhagen café, we don’t shrink — we smile. What our parents carried across oceans has become our inheritance. Bollywood taught us rhythm before we knew words, pride before politics, and the art of feeling too much in a world that asked us to feel less.
Maybe that’s what Bollywood really gave us — not just songs, but survival notes. Every chorus was a reminder that beauty could exist even in exile. Our parents dreamed in subtitles; we learned to dream in echoes. And though the world tried to translate us, we never stopped writing our own script.
When I hear those melodies now, I don’t just think of India or Denmark — I think of everything in between. The smell of spice on a winter night, the hum of the old parabol, the way my mother’s eyes softened when a familiar song began. That was home, long before we knew the word for it.
Bollywood didn’t just teach us to belong. It taught us to belong everywhere — and still stay ours.
