When the pandemic started, I signed up for a course on Leadership, and we had a very interesting chapter about ‘A Paradoxical Concept of Group Dynamics’ which talked about co-existing within a group by practising your individuality as well as practising groupness. It is not at all easy to achieve the ideal group dynamics, trust me. It is a paradox that one experiences in any group size like friends or family or religion or country or even the world. Here are few a paragraphs from that chapter

To build a group out of a collection of individuals, members must express their individuality. For people to become fully individuated, they have to accept the groupness upon which individuality is predicated.

The paradox of individuality is that a group relies upon the energies brought to it by its members as individuals, yet it is threatened by that very individuality, an individuality which ironically develops only when members invest themselves fully in the groups to which they belong, an investment which itself appears to undermine individuality. Freud in 1922 elaborated on the individual side of this in his explication of how individuality develops as one works on one's "groupness".
It is the impairment of one's connections to the primary group, the family, that stirs the intense desire to be individuated in the first place. By learning how to deal with one's groupness, the importance of individuation fades, and through its fading, individuation is realised. Benne in 1968 pointed out the group side of this paradox in his observation of the way members divide into camps over whether the group exists for its members or members exist for the group. He indicated that development depends on moving beyond this polarised perspective to the stage where members accept their groupness and the group accepts the importance of its members' individuality. The paradox is that the group gains its solidarity as individuality is legitimated, and individuality is fostered when the primacy of the group is affirmed.

The paradox of individuality runs counter to the instincts we all have on approaching a group for the first time. To imagine throwing oneself into a group before developing a clear sense of what it is like sounds insane. Yet, it is members' reluctance to engage that makes the group feel like a hollow cocoon, an unsafe place to take risks.
One special irony of this paradox is that members usually join a group to deal with some part of life that feels a sense of inadequacy. The inadequacy can grow out of aloneness leading to the search for friendship groups, out of the desire to develop new competencies that cannot be acquired in isolation triggering the joining of educational groups, out of the requirement to earn income for survival stimulating the connecting with employment groups, and out of the need for intimacy and social support forming the basis for creating family and emotional support groups. Hence, individuals come to a group looking for what they can get.
However, when everyone is approaching the group this way the question becomes who is going to do the giving?
This puts the group in the position of looking at its potential members in terms of what they offer the group, not what they need to be given, communicating the message to new members "if you want anything from this group, you are going to have to first do some giving!" So potential members look to see what others are getting and giving. What emerges is ambiguous. If it turns out that others are in this group because they have similar inadequacies, the individual will fear that the group will demand more than it will give, making joining seem pointless.
The paradoxical perspective emphasises that the group exists, grows, becomes strong and resourceful only as the individuality of its members is expressed. At the same time that a group requires connections, conformity, and similarity for its existence, it also requires discontinuities and differences. Both the differences that come as expressions of individuality and the similarities, expressed as connectedness, simultaneously jeopardise and strengthen the group.
In like manner, the similarities and the differences both support and threaten the individuality of group members. The expression of differences risks individual disconnection and collective disintegration while providing the possibility of connection based on personally meaningful commonalties. Similarly, the connections risk the stagnancy of conformity.
The paradoxical struggle is again within the individual and within the group, to live with the tensions that emanate from the group's dependency on the individuality of its members and the individual's dependency on the commonalty of the group.
There is no clear understanding of how to solve this paradox because the majority of the times it is very subjective and depends on the nature of the group. At the same time answering this for co-existing in the world is too complex a problem.

Now Diwali is a time where I feel more inclusive about being part of the family and I have always looked forward to this festival and some other days like Birthday, Ganesh Utsav, New Years etc because these festivals give me the sense of belonging with the culture and with my people.