The importance of maintaining cultural identity is a very important concept for people from the Indian sub-continent living in England and abroad. My mother always worries about becoming to Westernised losing our language, cuisine or culture down the generations or forgetting where we have come from and ultimately who we are. The melodrama of my mother’s ranting about this loss of culture is so very sad and how in a few generations there will be nothing left of our culture is something akin to dramatic disaster movies where; if the main protagonist does not cut the green wire the whole world will end and “We are all going to die! Something I would normally roll my eyes at if I wasn’t laughing at the dramatic proportions of guilt-tripping. However, having been born in the cultural hub of East London I don’t feel we have lost our culture but have instead brought it along with us. It has evolved and flourished, been nurtured by a new generation who has expanded its capacity for influence by fusing the Eastern culture of our ancestors and the Western culture of our day to day lives, not dictated by tradition nor held back by it. And how can it be wiped out anyway? It’s not as though our culture is not being maintained, Asia’s influence is embedded in history, food and the growing populations born into it every day! Being a British- Asian is also so much more than the stuffy image of old aunties and grannies wrapping their television remotes in cellophane and praying to God that their children have achieved three A grade A levels so that they can study medicine or law or biochemistry. That was never Asian ‘culture’ more just exaggeration and stereotype which create a generalisation that takes and holds the minds of the ignorant. Being Asian has always been about our grand cultures, religions and involvement in shaping the world as we know it today. Asian is being defined by a new cool, we are not ashamed or our Pakistani or Indian roots, nor are we all aspiring to become Doctors and accountants, instead British-Asians have discovered their true identity as a combination of all these influences and the outcome is a hybrid of cultural Excellency. Colour and Ethnicity is such a defining feature of our being to others that they we forget that it is but one facet of a spectrum of features which make us who we are, by refusing to be defined by just one feature we are making our identity on our own and this is what can make us all individuals for different and special. Culture can never be lost because it is never defined as one thing it is a malleable concept which is constantly changing, it lives in the present and is always evolving, we must cease what we have now and cherish it because this is our culture and we can change it define it and preserve it for many generations to enjoy.