Skip to main content

Feeling Sore

My friend A was telling me about the dread he experiences each time he sees a call coming from India. It is starting to take a toll on his mental health. His wife has lost several family members already, he has been lucky so far. We are both expats but living in different countries. The feeling of being alone in the local population where the subject has moved on from daily death tolls, is a shared experience. I have not had one person at work or among my circle of acquaintances ask me how my family in India is faring. 

They all do know that such family exists and reside there. In a precarious time like this where I start and end my day with a call to my parents to make sure they are okay, the lack of concern from people I spend all day with can start to grate on what is left of my nerves. All of us who have loved ones in India are putting on a brave front and carrying on like nothing is happening. That is so far from reality. I know in my case, I don't want to spend any time at all on small-talk with anyone. The socialization seems wasteful, pointless and contrived.

 A's company is moving a lot of its back office work to Philippines from India - good business continuity planning. But no one has enquired about his state of mind coping with bad news from home every other hour. He for his part is staying strong and doing his job as always.

I was listening to a BBC reporter interviewing a doctor from Bangalore on my way back from the grocery store the other day. The reporter's demeanor was one of pity and condescension when it came to the debate on vaccine patents. He suggested India would never be able to figure out how to manufacture the vaccine even if the patents were lifted. The insinuation was  that it would take the developed world to hand-hold the unskilled, good for nothing Indians until they could work out how to make it. Maybe I was having an emotional response that is not objective or warranted. I allow room for that. 

The good doctor played along and did not protest - maybe hoping that his entreaties for help on BBC would go further that taking offense at the ill-advised remarks of some random reporter. But I felt indescribably sad hearing this exchange - that the country I was born it, full of flaws and aberrations but still mine. Some of the brightest most talented people I know are from that country doing amazing work in very diverse fields. To suggest that our people could not figure it out was humiliating to say the least. Made me wonder when if ever we will stop being treated like we were the white man's burden.

Labels:

Comments

sathish said…
I can relate to this so much.. I work in India and working with counterparts In other countries, I feel the utter lack of empathy -- probably just the capitalism at work.. whatever happens, business should go on.

I can see some people feeling some sense of control by work - but, I just can't.
11:50 PM
ranjani.sathish said…
I drop in and read your blog posts now and then and they always seem to strike a chord. Your posts are written with empathy, sensitivity and lot of acumen.

I had to comment on this post, for you have articulated so well what is kind of going on in my mind too. Living in Bangalore, with Covid having visited our own doorstep(thankfully the recovery happened in home isolation), witnessing friends recovering in hospitals, seeing people we know well lose their lives to Covid and their close ones deprived of the usual mourning rituals..it does something to you. Any trivial talk around, seems to get on the nerves.

But keeping all these known people in my prayers everyday, gives a tiny bit of consolation.
11:55 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...
5 comments
Read more

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...
111 comments
Read more

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...
6 comments
Read more