The Kite Runner Scholarship Essay

Standing on the rooftop of grandma’s house, I push through the hordes of kids. Catching a glimpse of her gleaming face, my eyes dart from the colourful kite packed skies of Delhi to my cousin, Rishu, holding the spool in his bloodied hands. “Eyes on the kite!” my grandma cries with excitement, making it even more meaningful to win the title of “best kite fighters” in our colony.

With every summer visit to India, I explore the profound roots of my heritage that keeps me grounded. After losing grandpa to military service, my father migrated from the poverty-stricken state of Haryana to Delhi. Thus, his strict military discipline reflected in my upbringing. Being a daughter of a diplomat, I did not have a single defined environment where I grew up. Everything was temporary: friends, school, home. However, it was the unexpected, the unknown, that thrilled me the most. Kite fighting on the rickshaw clustered streets of Delhi or attending an Equestrian event in Normandy?

In the midst of this endless barrage, I continued my ritual of reading Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner. Forty thousand feet in the sky, I found childlike comfort in Hosseini’s words leaking into my life: the juxtaposition between the mosques of Kabul and temples of Delhi. Delhi’s

North Korea can only be described through the myriad of black and white pictures. The most heartfelt one is from the annual Arirang Festival: 30 inches tall, I stand next to my best friend Anwar in an antiquated Dobok, who smiles at the irony of wearing a Taekwondo uniform at a mass gymnastics event. 14 years later, sipping onto tea at breakfast in front of CNN’s broadcast and my parents conversing about Kim Jong-Un’s new antics, I am flooded with memories of local North Koreans - the verisimilitude of political propaganda shunning them. People I engaged with who shaped my childhood. People - because politics does not reflect