How To Be an Intl Student - w/ Gurasis

Gurasis recalls introducing himself for five minutes on his first day in a Montreal classroom in 2018. He had come from India to study media strategy and advertising at LaSalle College and believed he spoke English comfortably. When classmates stared blankly and the professor simply welcomed him and moved on, he wondered whether he had said something culturally inappropriate.

He was the only Indian in the class and already stood out through his turban and beard. In his telling, listeners caught little beyond his shortened name, Guru, and the word India. That first experience did not prove his English was poor; it exposed how unfamiliar pronunciation, rhythm, and context can interrupt understanding even when speaker and listener share a language.

A later law-class exchange made the pronunciation gap concrete. Gurasis repeated the word 'registered' several times before a classmate restated it with a local Canadian pronunciation and was immediately understood. Rolled R sounds and other differences followed him across school. The repeated friction eventually made an otherwise outgoing person decide that staying quiet was safer.

Silence did not fit his personality, so his first formal presentation became a reset. He told the class to ask him to repeat anything they could not understand. If he could not communicate with people in the classroom, he reasoned, he would struggle outside it too. The sentence acknowledged a shared comprehension problem without apologizing for having an Indian identity.

Gurasis describes code-switching as an understandable attempt to be heard, belong, and avoid being treated as the outsider in a room. It can help at first, but he says a person can eventually accumulate masks that are impossible to sustain. He tried adjusting his accent and cultural habits, only to realize years later that the resulting character no longer felt like him.