We all know that Columbus set out to find a way to India. When he arrived in the Caribbean, I wonder if he really did not know that he had reached a different land. Or he just decided to call whomever he found there 'Indians'. My money is on the latter. Either way, thanks to Columbus, the term 'Indian' has been used to refer to the native Americans. So when we, the real Indians arrived here, it took a while for us to get used to this confusion.
When I first came to America, there were not a lot of us Indians here. Any time we spotted one of our own, we tended to greet him or her and strike up a conversation. Now, as the population of Indians here has grown and as Indians have become prominent in many fields including politics, we barely pay attention to random Indians we encounter.
A few years ago, I was walking to the entrance of my office building after parking my car. I liked to walk around to the back entrance enjoying the small but quiet garden on the way. As I turned the corner, I noticed that there were a couple of men working on the landscape. One of them said 'Good morning' and I turned and saw a stocky man with brown skin. I returned the greeting and was about to go on my way when he followed up with the question, 'Are you from India?'.
In my years of living in America, every now and then someone would ask me if I am from India. It was usually small talk and was followed up with some tidbit such as, 'My doctor is from India' or 'I like curry'. Sometimes though it leads to more interesting conversation as this once when I was having lunch with some friends at a restaurant in Santa Monica. The waitress, seeing that we were from India, beamed at us and told us that she was saving up to make a trip to India. We learned that she wanted to visit the ashram of a swami near Pune. The swami's summer retreat was in Santa Monica apparently. I thought it took a lot of devotion to the guru to save up money on a waitress's salary to make that trip to India.
I recall another occasion when I was volunteering at a homeless shelter. We were serving breakfast to the people there. It was curious to see some of them with phones or other gadgets. There was a young family with their belongings including some furniture and a TV. It turned out that they had been evicted recently but the man was feeling hopeful as he had found a job and was sure of finding an apartment soon. But then another man waved at us and told us that he had visited India the previous year completely astounding me. I wondered how he had been able to afford that. More importantly why he had chosen to spend his money in this manner. What pulled him to India?
How the rest of the world sees India has always attracted a good deal of media attention in India. When you are abroad, on the other hand, you realize the coverage of India is vastly disproportionate to its size. For the longest time, mostly unsavoury news would make it to the papers here. As an Indian living here, you felt a certain responsibility to project a good image and such coverage used to irritate me. These days India does get more coverage but still it tends to be negative. Against this, it is very nice to encounter ordinary people like the above, people whom you would not even expect to be aware of India.
On this day, the landscape worker popped the question and so I stopped and answered that I was indeed from India. He smiled and said, 'I love India. It is so peaceful there'. Clearly, he was not from India although he had brown skin like me and could very well have been. Another Indian would not have had to declare his love for India to me and 'peaceful' would not have been the top adjective he would have picked to describe India. As much as we love our country, the crowds, traffic, etc. tend to dominate our image of India.
He surprised me further by revealing that he took a vacation with his family every year in India for a month making me very envious. I could only make a two week trip - three weeks if lucky, every other year. It turned out that he was from Afghanistan. I did not probe but my guess is that he could not go home for a vacation given that his country had been at war for many years. As I resumed my walk to my office, the fact that he chose India as the alternative to his home country and that he had felt safe and welcome in India filled me with a warm feeling.
