Karim feels restless and his life is filled with struggle and he is always experiencing difficulties with identifying his own identity because he is torn between his own Indian heritage and the desire to belong to the English society and be more English like (Ku?erová 48).This strong and severe identity crisis makes him struggling within himself.
However ; for Karim , belonging to his own cultural roots is a strong conflict because he cannot really associate himself with his father’s cultural background, although he still feels connected to it in some way, as it is mentioned in The Buddha of Suburbia: Cultural Identity in a Multicultural Society (Andersen etal.86-87) :”(…) but I did feel, looking at these strange creatures now- the Indians- that in some way these were my people, and that I´d spent my life denying or avoiding that fact. I felt ashamed and incomplete at the same time (…)”(Kureishi270).
Another example, as Cleven(20) mentions , which shows that Karim inclines towards his English roots and distances himself from his Indian heritage ,is the scene where Changez and Karim go to a football game. Karim calls Changez “a Paki”, that is, Karim makes no accurate distinction between India and Pakistan. Likewise, in the stadium, Karim forces Changez to cover his face “in case the lads saw he is a Paki and imagined Karim is one too” (Kureishi 98).
