Family History Paper

        I, Varsha Manglani grew up into a family of entrepreneurs in South Jersey but rose in North Jersey. Nineteen years ago, I was born in Camden Hospital at 8:00PM on October 22 twenty years ago. I spent a year of my life in Southern Jersey in a small town called Sewell. This house was owned my one of my two uncles on my dads’ side so all three families lived in this house with a total of nine kids. I am the youngest of my four siblings, which consists of my two brothers, twenty-eight and thirty-two, and my sister who is thirty. The six of us then moved to small town up in North Jersey named Roxbury where we spent two years before moving to West Orange, NJ. Throughout my nineteen years of living, I have been to many countries around the world and plenty of towns surrounding me that have shaped my life.

        My family background has a lot to do with the way I live because of my family’s morals and values. I’m Hindu, Indian. Both my parents both grew up in Bombay, India. They attended all four years of high school at Duralo Convent and St. Michaels. My dad did one year of college in the National College of India where as my mom didn’t attend college at all. My parents came to America from Mumbai in the early 1980s. They both lived in New York where my mom was a housewife and my dad worked for several jewelry companies before starting his own business, which is still running until this day. The family business, Roma Jewelers, named after my mom, is now located in Livingston Mall, Livingston NJ. Having my parents being brought up in India verses me being born in America and raised here all my life caused a lot of culture crashes because we were brought up a different way. My parents were always the type to only have Indian friends so they expected me to only be around suburban people all the time. Since West Orange is a low crime area, so they would always want me to stay away from Newark because of the type of people there are in cities with a high crime rate. Livingston Mall was the only mall around the area so seeing Newark people there everyday, in their eyes, didn’t seem like good company which is true in most cases for the majority of people who live there. At the end of the day, I understood because any parent would want their daughter to stay away from “ghetto” people because anything can happen at anytime.

        My first school in West Orange was St. Cloud Elementary School, in which I started at five years old, after attending boarding school in India. India was one of the many countries I’ve been too that shaped my life, not only because of my culture background, but because being five in a country without your parents is a hard experience. The only thing about India that I really remember and stopped me from being a troublemaker is the “ruler”. The ruler was a form of punishment over there, if you misbehaved, the teachers would make you balance a ruler on your back while your touching your toes, nearly impossible. If the ruler falls, you would get smacked with it. I only was in boarding school for five months though, I returned and graduated fifth grade from Saint Cloud at age eleven. I then attended the rest of my years of public school in West Orange.