My name is Girish Ballolla.
I have an Indian name.
More specifically, a Hindu name.
Not that most Americans would necessarily know the difference. To an unfamiliar ear, a brown man named Girish could be Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Jain, or something else entirely.
In the thirty-five years I’ve lived in the U.S., I remember being more aware of my name and how it sounds only after September 11. There were a few longer looks, a few moments when I could see someone staring at me at the boarding gate deciding what I might represent. Nothing dramatic happened. I was never attacked. No one told me to go back where I came from.
And over time, I stopped thinking about it. I stopped wondering whether my name sounded American. I stopped thinking of whether being born into a Hindu family was something that needed explanation. I stopped asking whether the country had made room for someone like me.
America had.
I came here at eighteen. I went to college, built a career, started a company, raised a family, became a citizen. Somewhere along the way, without ceremony or announcement, I stopped thinking of myself as someone trying to belong.
I simply belonged.
Lately, I have found myself thinking about that again.
Maybe distance has something to do with it. I have spent the past couple of weeks outside the United States, looking back at a country I have called home for most of my adult life. Though I no longer have a physical structure in America where I can instinctively say, this is where I live, America is still home.
Which makes it strange to look back at it now and feel a question returning that I thought had been settled years ago.
Who gets to belong?
Which may be why I remembered something from my formative years in the U.S.
When I first arrived in Lawrence, Kansas, where Kansas basketball is close to religion and Allen Fieldhouse is regularly described in language to match, I remember being surprised to have heard it called the Mecca of college basketball.
Americans use the word that way all the time. Cooperstown, NY is the Mecca of baseball. Nashville has been called a Mecca for country music. Silicon Valley became a Mecca for entrepreneurs. New Orleans, a Mecca for jazz. We reach for the word whenever we want to describe a place people feel compelled to visit, somewhere that represents the highest expression of something they love.
I never thought much about it.
Most of us probably don’t.
Mecca has become so completely absorbed into our vocabulary that we can use the holiest city in Islam as a metaphor for greatness without giving Islam itself a second thought.
And that is what feels so jarring about this moment.
We can invoke Mecca with reverence when talking about basketball and barely notice the Muslim reference. Yet let an American named Abdul El-Sayed run for the United States Senate, or Zohran Mamdani become mayor of New York, and suddenly their Muslim faith becomes something that political leaders believe the rest of us should find threatening.
There is something almost absurd about how completely we have absorbed the sacred geography of Islam into American language while becoming increasingly comfortable treating Muslims themselves as people whose loyalty requires examination.
We are comfortable borrowing the sacred language of people we are increasingly uncomfortable allowing to belong.
That is the Mecca problem.
And once you notice the contradiction, it becomes hard not to see versions of it elsewhere.
Once a country becomes comfortable turning difference into suspicion, the category of people who must explain themselves keeps expanding.
A Muslim candidate is asked, directly or indirectly, to account for his faith. Indians become synonymous with arguments about H-1B visas and jobs. Latino names get folded into debates about the border. Even something as joyful as a Diwali celebration can become, for some people, evidence that America is being changed by outsiders.
The target changes. The mechanism does not.
And increasingly, the mechanism is this: take something visible about a person—their name, religion, accent, skin, ancestry—and make it carry a political meaning they never chose.
There are legitimate debates buried inside all of this. Immigration policy matters. Borders matter. Visa programs can be abused. Assimilation matters. Extremism exists. Countries have every right to decide who enters and under what conditions.
But there is a difference between questioning a policy and questioning a people. We seem increasingly willing to blur that line. And sometimes the distinction reveals itself in something as ordinary as a name.
People have struggled with mine for thirty-five years. I have never minded. Girish Ballolla is unfamiliar to many Americans. You stumble through it, I help you, and we move on.
America has always had unfamiliar names. Irish names. Italian names. Polish names. Greek names. Russian names. Many once announced foreignness too. They were attached to people who were accused of refusing to assimilate, changing American culture, taking jobs, bringing dangerous religions or loyalties with them.
Over time, most of those names became simply American. They may still trip the tongue, but they rarely trigger a question about belonging.
Some names are difficult to pronounce.
Other names are made to explain themselves.
A Mohammed can carry something else. So can an Abdullah. A Lakshmi. A José. A Hector. An Eduardo.
Sometimes the name becomes the beginning of an entire story we write about someone before they have said a word.
Where are you from?
What religion are you?
Were you born here?
Are your parents citizens?
Do people like you share our values?
At what point does curiosity become an interrogation? And at what point does the person carrying the name realize that the question being asked is not really where they came from, but whether they have earned the right to be here?
For some Americans, assimilation eventually ends. For others, the test never seems to be over.
That realization bothers me more now than it once did, maybe because I am old enough to have believed we were getting past it.
But now I think about my three daughters with Indian names building their lives in America. I think about the children of friends I have known for years. Mohammeds and Abdullahs and Mayas and Lakshmis and Josés and Hectors and Eduardos. Kids growing up in the same neighborhoods, sitting in the same classrooms, playing on the same teams, applying to the same colleges, and imagining futures in the same country.
They are not demographics. They are not immigration categories. They are children I know. And I find myself wondering what their names will mean when they are thirty or forty years old.
Will Mohammed be allowed to become a physician without being expected to answer for Islam?
Will Lakshmi be able to build a company without being treated as evidence that Indians are taking something from Americans?
Will José be able to run for office without his name becoming shorthand for an argument about the border?
Will any of them eventually reach the point where the test is over?
One of America’s great promises was that you could become American. Not temporarily. Not conditionally. Not until someone became uncomfortable with your religion or your accent or your name.
You could become one of us.
We have never lived up to that promise perfectly. Our history makes that painfully clear. Every generation has found someone it was reluctant to include fully in the word American. But the promise still mattered. And it matters now because human beings have always built hierarchies of belonging. We instinctively divide ourselves into people who feel familiar and people who do not. We notice difference before we understand it.
Politics can restrain that instinct. Or it can weaponize it.
That is what concerns me most about this moment.
When elected leaders suggest that a Muslim candidate’s faith tells us something sinister about his loyalty, they are doing more than attacking a political opponent. When Indian workers are described broadly as cheats or invaders because of legitimate concerns about a visa system, something larger is being communicated. When immigrants become convenient explanations for everything from crime to housing costs to cultural anxiety, politics is teaching people where to place their fear.
Fear is useful that way. It can make complicated problems feel simple. Give economic anxiety a face. Give cultural change a culprit. Give frustration a name that sounds unfamiliar enough, and suddenly the problem is no longer a broken system or a difficult policy choice.
It is Mohammed.
It is Lakshmi.
It is José.
It is the person whose presence can be made to feel like an intrusion.
And this is where the contradiction becomes impossible to ignore.
America has become extraordinarily good at consuming cultures while remaining suspicious of the people who carry them. We eat their food. We borrow their words. We practice their traditions. We celebrate their festivals when they are colorful enough for a corporate calendar. We depend on their doctors, engineers, teachers, caregivers, entrepreneurs, and students.
The developed world increasingly depends upon people it is simultaneously teaching itself to distrust.
That is hypocritical and corrosive.
Belonging cannot survive indefinitely as something granted provisionally by whoever happens to have the cultural power to define what an American looks like.
I am fifty-three years old now.
I have spent almost my entire adult life in America. I have paid taxes, built a company, created jobs, raised children, and participated in the life of the country in all the ordinary ways millions of Americans do. I thought the question of whether I belonged had been settled a long time ago. Maybe that is why it feels so strange to find myself thinking about it again.
Not because I am worried someone is going to take my citizenship away.
I am worried about what happens when you still consider a place home but begin wondering whether the people governing it consider you fully theirs?
Not for myself. For my daughters. For Mohammed and Abdullah and Maya and Lakshmi and José and Hector and Eduardo. For everyone growing up believing that American is not a race or a religion or an ancestral claim, but something they are entitled to become fully.
No asterisk.
No recurring examination.
No requirement to reassure someone that their name, their faith, their parents, or their skin do not make them less loyal to the country they call home.
America has always asked the world to believe that it was a place worth reaching. A destination for people willing to leave something behind and imagine themselves becoming part of something larger. In that sense, we have spent generations trying to become a kind of Mecca ourselves.
A place people journey toward because of what it promises.
The Mecca problem is that we still want to be a country worth reaching while becoming increasingly suspicious of the people who arrive.
And I am not sure how long you can remain both.
Ex Cogitatione, Progressus
Girish
