NRIs : In search of an identity

March 26, 2008

Last Saturday, on Holi Day, we had a guest who we were meeting for the first time. We spent a good part of the afternoon and evening talking about our families, life in the ’70s in general and Indians in particular, future plans etc etc all the while trying to find a common ground. Just a little bit of history - this gentleman in his late 50’s born and brought up in India was one of the fine engineers the country produced in the ’60s; he worked a few years in India before moving to Japan with his family. It has been 28 years since. The reason I say he was one of the fine engineers is because people who studied engineering in that era knew what a Electrical Engineer was supposed to know and the universities didn’t produce them by the thousands. Least of all, unlike their current counterparts they didn’t throw their hands up in the air and make a distress call to the neighborhood electrician to fix their electric fuse. Engineering was not a passport to IT and money making; it was what every middle class family dreamed of so that their sons would make a career, have a better life than the mediocre life the government jobs offered then. Anyways, that’s a topic for another post.

So this gentleman and his family moved East and went to make a bright career for himself living the life every Indian aspired for - working abroad, all the fancy gadgets at home, car to drive, bringing suitcase full of goodies for dear ones back home, international education, saving for a good life in the future, and in general a standard of life that an Indian only heard of from their NRI relatives - TV was still not a household commodity in ‘80. He was not worried about future - who would take care of parents, would his children be able to relate to India, was it alright for them not to be close to their roots, not be able to converse in their mother tongue, the loneliness of his spouse in an alien land with a language that is not easy to pick up for a house wife etc..he took it by the year, visited annually for a few years initially and then lost touch for over a decade communicating with family here occasionally by phone. The children grew fine- did well in school, went to university in Europe, conversed with parents in Japanese. The gentleman got all that he ever dreamed of with his hard work - his career was his life. Today he is proud to have traveled over 45 countries with a house in Japan. Sounds like the perfect life, isn’t it?

Read between the lines as he spoke and you could feel the tinge of sadness in his voice, the sorrow in his eyes of having been so away from his roots for so long. He spoke of his job in Orissa in ‘72 as if it were yesterday. The passion was unmistakable, he remembered a great thali restaurant in Pune he used to dine at in late 70s that is still one of the finest. Ofcourse these nostalgic conversations were always interspersed with tidbits on the goodness of a developed nation. Today, his kids are in India in pursuit of wanting to do something different than their Japanese friends. India is an alien nation to them; just how Westerners strive to have an India experience on their resume it is fascinating for these kids to be able to work in India for a social cause (NGO) briefly, ultimately waning to settle in the West. They have tried real hard to forge relationships with all their cousins and catch up on all these years they have missed. They love being here but the Japanese upbringing in them is making it difficult for them to get adjusted culturally, socially..

The gentleman became a little uneasy as I popped the question that every NRI dreads- “Do you ever plan on coming back to India?” There is no direct answer you will ever get from any NRI. He smiled, shrugged and cited how easy it was to carry on there, he aspired to work and it was difficult to come back here and start all over and the conditions were exactly conducive to his temperament and went on to say how “Indians” behave - we’ve all heard fellow Indians bitch, so that’s alright. Today, he dreads walking alone on Indian roads by himself scared of the people, the traffic and fear of getting mobbed.

It is easy to pass opinions and make a judgment. If I were in his place probably I would have done the same thing, who knows? We all make choices, he made one years back. My dad often told me that it wouldn’t have been possible for him to put me through engineering if he continued working here in which case the opportunity would have gone to my brother and I would have had to settle for a B.Com, B.Sc whatever. This is not to say that parents of all the engineers today went abroad to educate their kids. Many could afford it here; some couldn’t.

This gentleman made a choice years ago - one that he though was a wise one that would improve the quality of their lives. That’s the paradox of choice. We can’t cling tenaciously to all of them. He made one just like so many of his generation. Now close to retirement they strive to be near their roots, with family, in a land where the language you’ve grown up speaking is spoken. This is also the time when their children have grown up and flown out of their nest. This is hard for them to accept unlike their Western counterparts - how ironic that NRIs want their kids to grow up like the rest of them and have Indian values. Many countries such as Japan do not offer citizenship for one- just a permanent residency and require you to be in Japan atleast for a brief period once in 3 years. What is painful is to see the struggle in their minds and swinging between their roots and the life they’ve adapted yourself to and the decision is killing them. In reality, it is a search for an identity and no one can help them in this - it’s they who have to decide. There are choices available - it’s up-to them to make one and feel at home.

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Comments

4 Responses to “NRIs : In search of an identity”

Dip on March 26th, 2008 1:33 pm

Our generation IT pros have another craze, having kid born in USA. My son is also born in pune and I am not sure thats going to be any disdvantage. Your thots on this..
Sanjana on March 27th, 2008 9:39 am

Nice article, Indians are the first one to make india feel small, why is it so that people think, if a person has done his degree from Foreign institution his value increases, although if we take a look at the present scenerio, Indians are really carving a niche in the international market in all fields. Recently I read about the current statistic of Indians positioning all over the world in SiliconIndia.com, that was really an informative article.
Born in the U.S.A. : Reflections — Lakshmi Nagarajan’s weblog [India, Pune, Trading, Stay at home mom, Bangalore, Writing, Freelancing, REC, NIT] on April 9th, 2008 10:51 am

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varsha on February 25th, 2010 8:40 am

You have written out my thoughts as it was/is. I have also seen these cases in my family circle. But the parents never let their kids down even when they are let down.Maybe this is the difference between the generations.