In the last week, while traveling abroad I met a few American families with daughters around J's age. The had either done a study abroad program or are currently doing their masters in Europe. Consistently, the young women do not look forward to returning to the US. They are doing what they can to stay on - they see the quality of life as being much better overall and specially for a woman now.
One young lady told me she does not want to waste her life trying to fix what is broken in America - this coming from a law student with interest in constitutional law. Instead she wants to take care of her own life and find a place where she can live without having her rights taken away one by one. She described it at as a level of broken that can no longer be fixed in one lifetime. This conversation was extremely reminiscent of those I had with friends in my college days - just about everyone agreed that there was no way to fix India and certainly not something they would put any effort into. The scale of dysfunction was dizzying and impossible to fathom.
We felt we had a much better chance of making it if we kept the focus limited - getting our own lives on track and helping immediate family along the way. Decades later, that is what everyone I went to college has done - and successfully too. An overwhelming majority left India. Those that stayed behind now have very privileged lives with enough money to create a thick layer of insulation between them and all that is broken about India. They live there but they don't live the experience of the average Indian. This is what survival entails. These young women have given up on America in much the same way - this is no longer the country they can relate to or feel they have any claim in.
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