Being Indian

(I actually wrote this as an opinion piece for the paper I work with. For various reasons, it did not work for the space it was meant to occupy. but it makes sense to me...and I bet to so many others like me.)

It’s not easy being Indian, especially if you are not immersed in the everyday ever-changing ethos of this country and its people. Ask anyone who has been keeping a watch on what the government has planned, over the years, to offer the Indian who does not live in India, announced each year with great fanfare at and around the annual Pravasi Divas jamboree. Various friends of mine who are Indian but have either never lived in this country or moved away when they were very young, are starting to look thisaways with a certain interest that they never felt before. It could be that they are all of the age when roots and true identity have begun to matter at a level that goes far beyond the cliché of ‘finding oneself’ or exploring one’s family tree. It could also more likely be that India has now changed, evolving into a country that is not as Third World and backward as it was once seen to be. And that seems a more plausible reason for coming ‘back home’.

When I was living abroad with my family, I was often seen as a rare beast, one who could not possibly have spent most of her life in India. A Japanese classmate of mine in the Baccalaureate programme in Geneva, Switzerland, asked me, in all innocence, whether I came from a village. It had happened before – in junior high school in the US – and happened again – in college, again in the US. The incomprehension of what I was about was not limited to language, but everything else, too, from food habits to dress code to moral principles to attitude. But I am like that only, I would protest. More, we in India are all like that only. What people did not understand then and perhaps are starting to do now, is the fact that in urbanised India, particularly in big cities like Mumbai, the divide between ‘them’ of the West and ‘us’ of the sub-continent has never been too great; and it has started disappearing. We are no longer as easily distinguished as aliens when we move out of India and make a life for ourselves in the United States or Britain or Europe somewhere. One reason for that is the vast numbers of Indians who went there before my generation did, and set the standard and the scene for folks like me to arrive.

The other is that we as Indians are less conscious of the fact that we are ‘different’. Many of us have already travelled abroad and are as comfortable being Indian in, say, New York or London or Sydney, without the ghetto mentality with which our predecessors so fiercely protected their identities. We know, after all, who we are and where we come from and that if we did go ‘back home’, there was a life worth living waiting for us. And – a point that few bother to consider – the diversity in this country is so vast and the distances between cities and communities shrinking (metaphorically, of course) so fast, that mismatches and dissonances are so rapidly incorporated into existing cultural norms to become new and generally improved codes of conduct. The same assimilation takes place when someone from Mumbai moves to New York to live, or vice versa – the adjustments necessary today for the latter are more about dealing with bureaucracy to get a phone connection, finding the right servant or keeping mould out of your shoes during the monsoon. There is the expected feeling of drastic change from the world you are used to, but it goes away soon enough.

Best of all, the Indian now knows that opportunity is knocking quite enthusiastically on a national level these days. ‘Progress’, ‘money’ and ‘advancement’ are no longer buzzwords that stretch visa queues outside consulates in the city. So much so that people who moved away from India years ago are now looking to come back, to ‘give back’, to find a life that is as privileged and comfortable as they discovered outside. Which is why the NRI is being wooed to return home, moneybags a-rattle, to show off what India and its Indians are capable of, given the chance…now, all home-grown and of international standard.

The new urban Indian is as much of a global citizen as is someone from San Francisco or Rome, without the ubiquitous bottle of mineral water and the unfamiliar accent. Perhaps only the residence permits or PIOs make the difference.