Non-Resident India

by Parth Pandya

[box]It’s a well-known fact that there is an India residing outside of India in countries like the U.S., the U.K. and Australia. What exactly are the sort of sentiments that run within the minds of these non-resident Indians (NRIs)? Parth Pandya writes on the global Indian’s life. Among the many things he talks about, is also their perception of the country that’s their real home.[/box]

Some 30 million of my brothers and sisters live outside India. I learnt about these siblings in a pledge I learnt in school. The number – I need to thank Wikipedia for it. What does it mean to be a population larger than countries like Australia and Malaysia? A diaspora this size can hardly be called sporadic. Do we then have an India outside of India that is without the hegemony of borders and the dissonance of states? Is this the India of the NRI, by the NRI and for the NRI?

Each one of those who has ventured out of India to go to their destinations – be it the United States of America, or the United Kingdom, or down under in Australia, or to unexpected locations like Iceland, carries a snapshot of India that forms the basis of how they remember their place of origin. Every subsequent trip to India is an exercise in revising this image. How often have you seen the shocked expression on the face of an NRI when he looks at a menu in a restaurant in India and utters, “Oh, is that dish worth Rs. 200?” Never mind that the same person would not blink for a moment when gobbling down a latte and a slice of bread to go with it even though it may cost the same. It isn’t their fault – the complaint is not about the money involved. The shock is that of not recognising that while the India in their head has stalled to when they last visited it, or mainly, when they last spent a good time experiencing it, the real India that is growing and mutating in all ways and means, has moved ahead.

These migratory birds who leave the shores of Mumbai or rise above the smog of Delhi share a common trait – the desire to go back. I’ll focus on a small sub-section to illustrate my case. Consider Indian students who come for graduate study in the U.S. From my extensive conversations with colleagues who have signed on for this non-resident experience, I have come to describe the situation with what I call the ‘n+5 theorem’. Excusing a few variations, almost every story starts with folks boarding an airplane wearing a ridiculous suit, with loads of relatives happy to see them off and a sense that they aren’t really prepared for the unexpected. The trip abroad is a shift of the magnitude of the movement of tectonic plates. The breaking up of world into continents. Literally. It is a fabulous experience, a coming-of-age for home-grown boys and girls, a step into a life which is tangentially opposite to the one you know, a rite of passage that will shadow you for the rest of your life. Therein lies the dilemma. How influential is the shadow? How long will the effects linger? How long are you bound to stay in this country? Expatriates often fail to clearly answer the one question that they should have answered foremost: why exactly are they here? For the love of God, money, education, partying, freedom, women, men, rental cars, Walmart, rental apartments, unlimited refills of soda, Taco Bell, long weekend deals, rolling Rs: one of these, all, or none? They go to the U.S., get through their Masters, get their first paycheck, their first car, make first serious attempts at arranged nuptials, actually getting married, getting their H1B visa stamped, applying for the green card, buying the first house, fussing about their lawn, buy bulk groceries from Costco and if productive, have a couple of babies too.

The seemingly unbreakable sequence of events stated above is punctuated with trips to India where a few tears are shed with the parents, comments are made about how India is progressing, observations are made about how the country has changed beyond recognition, pleasant nods are given when told that kids are best brought up in India, U.S’s role in world affairs is tch-tched, and a general doomsday prediction is made about how your life will go down the drain if you decided to stay on forever in the U.S. Sum of all fears, expectations and conversations is a common refrain: I’ll come back to India in five years. Somehow, the magical number of five has stuck. Perhaps it has do with the arithmetic around finishing your degree in two-three years, getting a job and recovering or accumulating some money, depending upon how graduate life has treated you. Somehow, five seems the talismanic number that people agree upon as a good time to have enjoyed the good life before they head back to their roots. Somehow, five seems to be the acceptable threshold at which you haven’t done too much to break all ties with your family and friends, where you and your American passport-holding kids will have least trouble adjusting back to the reformed India. However, if it were all so easy to pack up and start all over again, why isn’t it so? It’s a vicious cycle of voluntary entrenchment. You dig your heels in, enjoy the stability and yearn to be swept off by the ocean waters you see from your stakeout place on the top of the trees. There is still always the hope, always the desire, for you know you don’t belong here. The plan to return is always existent, just difficult to implement. Hence the ‘n+5 theorem’ that you hear often: the time of return to India is 5 years … from today.

In the meanwhile, life in the adopted country of native dreams carries on its dance of deception. A life where the body remains cocooned in a veneer of comfort, yet laments that the soul rests entrenched in the familiar discomfort of the motherland. The above example cuts through one slice of the different characters that make up the diaspora. Each character serves up a different story. It is the story of the first generation immigrants, who worked their way up the chain in completely uncharted territories to give themselves and their kids a better life. They find refuge in the few instances they can connect with their motherland – the Indian grocery store, the movies, their social circle, the occasional Diwali and Holi celebrations and the wafting smells of food in the kitchen that increase their nostalgia when set to tune to old film songs. It is also a story of the student who ventures abroad to seek higher education. These stories vary from those who came here before the explosion of opportunities in India to the the latest recruits from India for whom the foreign land is not foreign at all, what with the exposure they get thanks to television and the Internet. It is also the story of the foot soldiers of the IT service industry in India, setting up temporary shelters in the far reaches of the world. Indians living abroad span the spectrum – from being much-maligned as H1B workers to the target of racist attacks in Australia, from bringing up a generation of cliché fulfilling high-achieving South Asian kids to becoming the impromptu ambassador for India whichever setting they are in. They’ll stay up to watch cricket matches where India feature, but be equally at ease with discussing NFL at the water cooler the next day. All unaccustomed sons of an accustomed earth.

Each story makes up a thread in this intricate quilt that represents non-resident India. In today’s world, where ‘Vasudaiva Kutumbakam’ (the world is one family) is taking shape more than ever, the India we know goes beyond its borders that form that beautiful shape that adorns maps and emblems. It resides, well and alive, in its non-residents.

Parth Pandya is a passionate Tendulkar fan, diligent minion of the ‘evil empire’, persistent writer at http://parthp.blogspot.com, self-confessed Hindi movie geek, avid quizzer, awesome husband (for lack of a humbler adjective) and a thrilled father of a precocious two-year-old boy. He grew up in Mumbai and spent the last eleven years really growing up in the U.S. and is always looking to brighten up his day through good coffee and great puns.

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