Be the Global Indian. Why an award back home?
Know that when you
leave India for opportunities overseas. Know that you will be worshipped for
the material status you have gained. Know that you have in a way shown your
natives that there is a way beyond being in the grave. If that does not exist
here, then it is not a choice about where it exists, it is a choice about
wherever it exists.
That you still lift
the race, the natives and its land not in lure or poetry but showing the larger
world that you can do better; better than what the world expects from a land of
poor and deprived. That you have earned every bit of it. And in doing so, you have set your head higher
and so for a billion others.
Yet fall not for the
traps of the back home again. They are myriad in plentiful ways. They celebrate
an ordinary success as a matter of enormous pride. They snatch away your bits
and take that for the fortune of where you belong. They will make you ride that
pedestal. Make you the Sire beyond the greatest Sire back home. They will
convert headlines and Full pages out of a minor column on you elsewhere.
That is the way the
Grave lives and has learnt to give a reason for its existence in an alive,
evolving world.
And if you fall for
the powers of the supernatural craft, be prepared to take the roads that only
the Fallen Heads lead.
Hey the Non Resident Indian,
you are doing far more than every resident Indian. You are a world citizen.
Acknowledged for the unique and rare skills. You are your country’s Ambassador
in real, on ground. Look ahead to take your pride sail in the wider horizon.
Please never look back to seek that in the limited world of ‘back home’.
If only Rajat Gupta
knew!
Well thought out and written... Though I don't agree with the concluding despair. As if every NRI is selfless! And, what of the White Anglo Saxon Protestants (WASPs) and Jews who have been doing exactly what Gupta did, but got off with reprimands?
ReplyDeleteAh, patriotism and comfort are hard spells to break. The acclamation from having been a soldier is intoxicating and, like an alcoholic, you don't want to stop drinking it. Then, the fact that you took an oath to uphold and support a Constitution that was obviously being disregarded, can no longer be brushed aside. The argument that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, no longer makes what you did OK. That the same people want to come here after your country has bombed and killed their mothers and sisters and brothers becomes increasingly ironic. You cannot overcome the urge tell the 7 Mexican families living in the house across the street from you that this is not the American dream. The same with the engineer from India at work who is paid $60,000 when his American counterparts are paid $100,000. While you realize that your ancestors were immigrants, you suffer at a country that continues to bring in so many immigrants to these shores when 25 million Americans are looking for work. You shake your head at a government that spends millions of your dollars creating irrigation canals and then, when mother nature puts minnows in the canals, withholds the irrigation water, laying so much land to waste and then, when to its demands, private enterprise begins to put in a solar farm for power, the government passes a bill giving the land to the feds in DC to keep the farm from being developed because someone found 28 turtles on the property.
ReplyDeleteThen, one day, it hits you. This is not the country that you grew up in. The opportunity that you once knew is no longer and has been replaced with a struggle. The patriotism that you bear is a cross that you carry towards your destruction. So you throw it down and feel the relief and the freedom again. You look for a place to take your desire to work and help others succeed. There are many places in the world that need it but, you decide on Africa. They adopted the same Constitution and English is their national language. That feeling of worthiness returns. Africa, here I come.