Skip to main content

Gated In Bangalore

The media often carries stories of the returned native and their gated community lifestyle in Bangalore and elsewhere in India. The more I read about the perspectives of the individuals who have made this choice, the more confused I get. While moving back to India at this time makes perfect sense from a career growth perspective, every other aspect of the "return to India" deal seems fraught with angst and confusion.

To begin with, the ideal of being close to ones roots and having children immerse in one's own culture is severely compromised by choosing to breathe in the rarefied atmosphere of an NRI enclave. When parents persist in celebrating Halloween and the like in India, they confound the problem manifold. Needless to say, the locals would be totally out of their depth. Presumably then, social interactions would need be limited to the similarly foreign returned with total years spent in the US, citizenship status of family members and the like forming key indicators of social status and net worth.

These children will likely end up doubly confused about their splintered identity being unable to straddle two worlds with as much facility as their parents. It would have to be thrust on them because they would not see the need to maintain multiple mixed identities. It seems to me that the objectives beyond career are not clear enough to be pursued to any logical end.

It is a pity that children get to be the victims of such appalling lack of direction and focus. Are we raising a generation of super-rich, US-born, India-raised misfits with horribly entitled attitudes ? It would be an awful lot of stunted if not fully wasted potential - a national loss.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

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...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Changing Pace

This blog has been a big part of my life for the last five years. Besides giving me the opportunity to connect with a number of interesting people and share my thoughts and ideas with them, it has been a form of daily meditation for me. No matter what the day threw my way, I made a very deliberate effort to find a little quiet time to write.The process of thinking about what to write and then the act of writing itself worked as an antidote to aggravations big and small. Five and half years ago, when I started Heartcrossings both my personal and professional lives left a lot to be desired for. The only real happiness I had was in being J's mother. While that was often enough to make me forget what I did not have, I sorely needed a third place to call my own and shape in the likeness of my dreams. This blog has been where there were no limits or constraints and that was absolutely exhilarating - it is the reason I have been able to nurture it for as long and as much as I have. A lot ...