Cheeky Boy Travel Blog: Post 9

NRIs and the Problem with Fantasizing About Perfection

India is too hot. India is too crowded. The Indian poor are too uneducated. Ask a former NRI what’s right with India and he’ll steer the conversation to all that’s wrong. After years of living abroad those who return to the motherland describe their experience as interesting. They say this with a weariness that makes me suspect they’d rather be anywhere else.

Then there’s Disha. Born and raised in New Delhi, when her friends went to New York for college she went to Mumbai. She loved it! For her India is about having immediate access to a million different worlds. She craves Punjabi food in the summer and Rajastani food in the fall. She loves Rishi Kapoor and the fine-featured UP boys. Bandra nightlife is almost an addiction. Some would call her manic. I call her young and tireless. As for pessimistic NRIs, she is having none of it, “Listen, if they could handle this country they’d be living here right?” Point taken.

Mumbai makes New York seem like child’s play. America is a country of organized streets and orderly traffic. A country of self-directed people who go about their lives shielded by the numbing comfort of ensured prosperity. This brings to mind the story told at the end of Derek Jarman’s film Wittgenstein. It’s about a man so brilliant that he’s able to sustain perfection. Enthralled by the pristine world of ice he had created by the time he realized he couldn’t walk it was too late. There was no escape.

In India nothing comes easily even for the privileged. Step out your door and the harsh realities of being a developing nation stare you in the face. Consequently, optimism is tempered by pragmatism as one always has to reconcile the way he wants things to be with the way things actually are. But lunchtime at Café Coffee Day provides a glimpse of what some hope will be India’s future; organized, orderly, populated by those shielded by the numbing comfort of ensured prosperity. These businesspeople, contentedly chatting on cell phones, seem a million miles from the slums and open air stalls that have come to define this country in my mind. No longer fearful of downturns and reversals of fortune they will soon finish their lattes and then get back to the business of creating an India that even NRIs would approve of.

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