Indians have really misplaced loyalties and are ashamed to call themselves Indians. I have seen North Indians dont mix with South Indians. Indians mix only with people speaking the same language. Many times people of same caste mix with each other. Unlike Pakistanis, there is no Indian association in US, what they have is Tamil Associaition, Marathi Association, Bengali Association. I am surprised India is still one country…
Misplaced Loyalties and Identity Crisis
As a part of my daily blog reading I was amazed at what I read on GVK’s blog .
This made me reflect on what someone once said to me about the Indian diaspora, which I later realised was true of all Indians.
http://mymysore608.blogspot.com/
A few years ago, my husband and I had organised a large Deepavali party for a large group of our friends in Singapore. The attendees were a mixed lot. There were a handful of Indians, some Chinese, Singaporean, German, Dutch, Pakistani, British, Kiwis and a few other nationalities thrown in for good measure. Halfway through the evening, a Singaporean friend came up to me and said she had a very sensitive question to ask me, and whether we could meet up the following day where she could talk to me about it at leisure. I wondered if someone had said something insensitive (or plain stupid), or whether she didn’t like the food or if we had inadvertently offended her in some way. So the next day we sat down over a cup of coffee, and seeing that she wasn’t too comfortable with whatever was on her mind, I asked her what she wanted to talk about. Her reply shocked me to the core.
“Don’t Indians have a sense of national identity?”
I was shocked. Why would she ask me something like that? I gently prompted her, trying to get to the root of her question. Her reasoning was simple. This was the first time she was meeting a few of the people at the party, and she had asked people where they were from. Our other friends had promptly said Pakistan, Britain, Holland, Germany etc etc. But apparently every one of the Indians had said something like, “I’m from Andhra, (or Karntaka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Punjab, Rajasthan as the case may be).”
Her point was rather simple. All one needed to have said was that they were from India. But everyone apparently introduced themselves as denizens of one state or the other. Weren’t we all Indians? Didn’t that matter most to all of us? Why was which part of India we came from more important?
I really didn’t have a reply to that. Like she said our national neighbour never said he was from Baluchistan, he just said he was from Pakistan… Then why the difference in attitude on this side of the border?
I was speechless at that simple piece of logic. I pondered about it for a while and mailed a dear friend who lives in New Jersey. Her response was thought provoking. She said wherever you are join the Kannada sangha, Marathi Mandal, Tamil Sangam, Gujrati Samaj or whatever… Otherwise who will you have to talk to??
Was that true? I thought not. So I asked a friend of mine who was at the party and who had by then lived in Singapore for 15 years. She pointed out that my husband and I had refrained from joining any community/language based associations. Did that make a difference? Of course it did. As she had noticed, the group that had showed up for our little get-together was very mixed, and was very lively. And she said that when one was a member of some of the associations, their circle of acquaintances was comprised mostly of other members. Did not joining any sabha/sanga etc mean we didn’t have anyone else to talk to? Of course not…
Then I cast my net back towards the US. I asked my sister, who was then studying in a university in the deep South, what she thought. She too concurred with my friend in Singapore. She too had not joined any Indian association or any such body. She had a large mixed group friends, Indians, Americans etc… Not being a part of any association didn’t mean she didn’t have anyone to talk to.
I believe that an element of homesickness does occur when one is abroad, and leads one to gravitate towards others from nearer home. That’s not unnatural. What I find unnatural is that once one has found a country cousin(s), one starts to ignore anyone else who makes a gesture of friendship. I found this to be true in Singapore. Most of my Indian friends there were, again, like us, not a member of any group. I have nothing against those who are members of such groups, but it is a certain fact that they are not too comfortable being around others not belonging to their respective groups. There could be a hundred friendly faces around them, but they could not see it, looking for a face from THEIR group.
This morning I called a friend in Tokyo… I asked her the same thing. Did she belong to any group… The answer was yes… Otherwise who will one talk to.
