so i'm not going to lie. most of 2012 has been kind of crappy so far.

however, in the past couple of weeks we've started to see a turn around, that i'm hoping will only continue through the rest of the year...you can still redeem yourself 2012!

as you know, my husband is from india. he's pretty proud to be indian too.

when we first married, he was pretty sure that he'd never want to change his citizenship, but over the past few years we started to see how it would definitely be a good practical move. even in the worst of times, US citizenship is as good as gold...which is something that i think us natural born citizens sometimes take for granted.

so we've been in the whole immigration process for awhile now. for someone from india or china, the immigration process to become and US citizen, or even a greencard holder, is SUPER long. this is because there's just a certain quota per country of people allowed to immigrate each year...and it's majorly backed up.

thankfully for us though, marriage does expedite the process...to about 5 years from what could easily end up being 15 or 20 years.

dealing with immigration can be kind of like dealing with the DMV on crack...sometimes inefficient, lots of bureaucracy, etc... things usually end up taking longer than you'd expect them to.

so when my husband got a letter to show up for his citizenship interview on april 26, we fully expected that citizenship was probably still 6 months away at best.

however, once he'd completed his interview, and taken a civics test, they asked him if he wanted to go ahead and swear in later that day...as in to become a US citizen!

so i quickly moved around my schedule, and called up a few close friends and family who i thought might want to be a part, and we made a day of it!



it was a pretty cool experience. apparently a few years ago, they would just have big swear in ceremonies every few months...but recently they had started having them 4 times a week!

for such a frequent ceremony, it was cool to still see about 85 other people take the oath with shomik. there were i think 36 countries represented, and i'm sure some of the people had been on a long journey to get to that day. it really was kind of moving.

so now our kiddo will have 2 american parents when he or she arrives in a few weeks! we'll have to apply for passports for both shomik and the baby now!



india doesn't allow dual citizenship, but shomik, the baby, and i can all qualify for basically the indian equivalent of a greencard, which means we can pretty much do anything in india but vote. and we definitely won't need visas to go.

so it's been pretty exciting! i thought somehow it would be a little more difficult and emotional for my husband to have to give up his indian citizenship, but he's been purely thrilled to become an american!

my grandma came out to see shomik swear in, and she said it was the best day of her life! haha. i hope that isn't really true, but it has definitely been a cool thing for everyone...my family included! :)


3 Comments

  1. Congratulations! 5 years isn't that bad. I've heard for non-married individuals it can also cost as much as $15,000 to complete the naturalization process. And that was a while ago so it may even be more expensive now. Hurray for marriage lol.

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  2. wow! i can't believe that he got his citizenship so fast! that's awesome! congratulations :)

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  3. Oh my.... that is soooo cool! I remember my big one with hundreds of people! Some even in Uniform, already serving! Very cool! But I was glad to be able to keep my german one as well. :-) Congratulations! Oh... and I bet Shomik know now more than you do about the civics of America! :-)

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