Being an Indian Outside India

 

We are popularly known as Non-Resident Indians (NRIs).

Immigrating sounds glamorous to most of us Indians and it mostly is. It is an opportunity to upgrade your own life and that of your family, which is why most of us are keen to reach greener pastures. Although the process is stressful, in the end, we do reap the rewards of a more convenient life and access to a higher income.

Every immigrant will tell you how wonderful life is in a foreign land. If they don't tell you, you clearly see it in their social media activity.

Here is what they don't tell you – life overseas is a big challenge. They don’t tell you the discomfort you feel when you cannot fit into your new social environment. They don't warn you about how much you may end up missing your family or your country. They don’t tell you how the small things that irritated you back home are the things you miss the most. You miss the marigold flowers in your mother’s temple in her kitchen, you miss adding ghee to your dal, and you miss a lot of things that you believed were unimportant.

This longing unexpectedly intensifies around India’s major festivals – Diwali, Ramzan, Dusshera, Bakrid and even Christmas. When you remove the current religious polarisation of India from the equation and think a bit logically, you realise the importance of each of these big days and it hits home hard.

I’m not Hindu by religion but every Indian festival is a part of my DNA. I enjoy watching Bathukamma as much as I enjoy eating a Christmas pudding or the delectable haleem. This integration in me becomes stronger with every passing year and every festival day – it makes me proud of my heritage and this is celebration enough.

We naturally take our heritage for granted – ghar ki murghi, dal barabar, which translates to ‘we don’t value what we have enough ever (but just not in those words). It takes us time to realise that this same heritage, which we continuously overlook, is precious and needs to be cherished on all occasions.

Today, we are unfortunately swept by Western fashion and beauty standards. It either takes us time to see the beauty in our heritage or we fail to see it at all, and this is extremely sad. No culture is perfect – it is as flawed as we are. We view the imperfections of our cultures as valuable only when we have been distanced from them for a while. Our human hearts long for familiar experiences and environments and this is normal!

How do I deal with this way of living? To feel closer to India, I celebrate or observe nearly every big Indian festival, irrespective of religion, in my own small way. It is true, distance does make hearts fonder, so I proudly wear clothes that are representative of who I am.

My hope for India this Diwali is that the leadership of our country starts viewing the diversity of religions as a rare gift and cherish them all equally. I hope we can move forward, improve, change or remove ourselves from our heavily polarised societies, within India and overseas.

So, to my fellow Indians and desis, Happy Diwali, Shub Diwali and Diwali Mubarak!