My friend B is ultra-liberal born and raised in Boston. She lived in California for twenty years before real estate prices drove her out of there to cheaper southern states. Her disappointment with present day America is complete and she often asks me if she can find gainful employment in India and what it may cost to live there. I warn her that a brunette with green eyes would not quite blend with the local scenery and suggest NZ or Australia instead.
She has this interesting Michael Moore-ish theory about state sponsored obesity along the lines of "Cheap processed food is the opiate of the masses". Give people too much to eat, bait them with a slew of consumer goods, McSUVs and McMansions, allow them to sink in bottomless debt you create an atmosphere of unparalleled insecurity and fear. An over-full stomach gives them a false sense of comfort. A dread combination that turns out just perfect for dictatorship to thrive.
Fear of loosing their jobs, of loosing their assets, of loosing their waistline all add to up the sum total of terror. A terrified people is very easy to manipulate. "Absolute greed is what fuels American economy" she often says. B has been in IT long enough to know that the head honchos want to keep all the money at the cost of the jobs, lives and livelihoods of their fellow Americans. If there is money to be made, they will not blink before laying-off workers at home and outsourcing their jobs.
B and many baby boomers like her that I know foresee a dark and grim future for their country and don't want to be any part of it. Had B been younger, she would have actually made the move abroad but with age against her, she probably will not do that and end up living in a cheap southern state suffering the oppressive climate of fear and suspicion. She is terrified of the holy-rollers whose tribe seems to be growing in alarming numbers. The last time we discussed the subject of an hospitable habitat for B, a condominium like the Hydropolis project in Dubai on international waters seemed a decent enough option.
An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
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