India Extended…

Is a nation defined by its boundaries or by its language and cultures?

Back home, we would greet strangers with the commonest possible question;

“Where are you from?”

Now, WHY such a question is asked, we all know, in our varying levels of sociological profiling awareness.

The best answer I have ever received back home, in India, was “From India, same as you….”

The best answer I have received here, in Glasgow, was “Does it matter? I speak your language….”

The boundaries of India once stretched from the upper reaches of the Afghan mountains to the vast saltine marshes of the Hooghly delta.

We might have not spoken the same language then….We even might not have been aware of the extent of our domain.

After Partition, we suddenly did become aware …. Painfully aware….

And after years of being subject to varying influences of regionalism, communalism, casteism et al, without a hint of secularism anywhere, we finally landed on the far shores of a country, not our own, bereft of belief, cynical and hardened by years of defining ourselves and teaching ourselves to be concerned of none else but what concerns us.

And suddenly found cousins and relations…..of language, of culture, of belief, of understanding….across the border and yet in a different country altogether….

We found kindred souls with the same love of Hindi movies and cricket….of the need for heartfelt abuses peppering a conversation shared over gallons of sweet milky tea and cheap cigarettes….of the sudden ease of a person whom you don’t know and yet understand…..

All on the basis of a common language & culture….

Fine, we call it Hindi and they call it Urdu…

Fine, they add salt to their tea and call it kava and we add sugar and call it chai…

Fine, we have the prettier actresses and they have better singers….

Fine, we cant decide who’s fielding a worse team presently….

The differences are less than we had assumed and the similarities more than we could have imagined!!!!

We’ve all here suddenly found pals who we might have grown up with, it seems and allies against the alien culture we find ourselves in.

Suddenly our boundaries are extended…..

One of my old pals who is presently in Melbourne, Australia was just trying to tell me how normal and similar Pakistani’s are to us……I first heard the same a long time when another one of my friends went to Pakistan on a Peace Promotion trip a long time back.

Not that I had specific animosity or such, but Kargil was quite recent and its hard to understand much from what the governments and media spouts.

When cable TV would show the PTV channels, we’d get very upset about how India was being subverted and shown in a bad light or whatever….Never considered how the Pakistani’s might perceive NDTV and Barkha Dutt….

One of the most hilarious scenes I observed recently was when two friends & idiotic buffoons from India and Pakistan started horsing around pretending to be journo’s and media guys from their respective countries……the whole comedy merely underlined the issues of trust and comfort of the ACTUAL people on the ground, rather than the governances or systems…..

My old Chinese roomie truly believes that the Dalai Lama is a threat to China and is building a core terrorist camp in Dharamshala……My American friends think that Bush is an ignorant savage and are even more vociferous in condemning him than ourselves……The Scots and English and the Italians and the Iranians and the Russians and the where-ever-you’re-from’s ……they are all not what we perceive them to be…..

True, there are some similarities…..the Africans or those of African descent DO talk like rastafarians….the English CANNOT smile or laugh with their mouths open……the Scots WILL deep fry a chocolate mars bar……the Iranians ARE sexy and promiscuous….the Chinese ARE incomprehensible when they try to speak English…..and so on and so forth…..

But these are generalizations…..Chanel talks like a BBC newscaster (though she does do wicked imitations of a lot of different people)…..Kat laughs like a banshee and is really cute when she does show her wisdom teeth…..Gillie is still very fat conscious….El Naz does have pimples on her face now…….and Chu-se-kai does manage to be understood in English ……

And we Indians ???

We carry on in these far shores, a part of India in our souls……

We make a decent hospital waiting room appear like a Bihar station when one of us is sick….

We do try and bargain even in discount sales……

We do wear thermal clothes ready for North Pole even on a summer’s day….

We do try to bhangra, even when the DJ is playing ballroom music….

But….

We still hear the familiar strains in the accented English….and sometimes unaccented ones as well…

We still understand problems that can ensue out of seemingly simple questions and issues…

We still absorb the old ways and find askance at changing them….

We still are a singular people….divided by boundaries….marked before we were born

We still are the same people….undivided when pressed upon….wittingly or unwittingly

We still are ….. and continuing to be…..India extended….