Impressions of an Indian Diaspora

By MR Dua

These are the changing faces of India seen through the eyes of a person of Indian origin. He rushes into wrong first impressions, but soon corrects—yes, India has changed, is changing though through  messy, trial and error methods…. Who could say where it was headed…..

Impressed, perhaps deeply influenced by the post-1991 economic boom, many a highly educated and successful Indian youth in the United States of America and other western countries, have returned to their motherland after long absence.

  They thought ‘India was booming, with seductive options and possibilities’, but on closer view, they found that even though it had made fantastic  transformations in every field, its innate environment still needed to go much forward. The so-called economic revolution had effected no significant modification of the ancient Indian society.

  This is the gist of what Akash Kapur relates in this readable volume. Born to an Indian father and American mother, Kapur spent his ‘formative years and early adulthood in the US’. Consumed by a desire to understand the true India and witness its multitudinous faces, he settles down in Auroville, a small salubrious hamlet, near Pudducherry, with his American wife and two young sons.

He chose a spot not far from Chennai where he had been earlier, to be able to move around, make new friends and speak with villagers. And then he started noting the changes that had occurred while he was away. He found that India was definitely shedding the asceticism and austerity that had marked it for far too long, and becoming an acquisitive society.

  But despite the 1991 barrage of radical reforms, Kapur finds pervasive poverty side by side affluence, everywhere. To learn more about the paradox in the social milieu he travels to interior villages and digs into personal lives of some individuals. He meets his boyhood friend, R Sathyanarayanan, or Sathy, who lives in the village Molasur where he owns thousands of acres of land. Sathy’s wife Banushree Reddy, an MBA prefers city life, and stays in Bengaluru with their two children. Kapur learns that dalits are no longer a suppressed section of society.

  The author meets a young IT worker Hari, whose ‘gay’ life in the conservative Indian society flummoxes him. He then runs into a young IT-trained workaholic girl Selvi, who believes that ‘if you rest, you rust.’  Her parents are uneasy about her contacts with boys who might harm her. But she is confident of protecting herself--she will stay ‘faithful to her parents.’

  Kapur also met a highly educated divorcee, Veena, who had gone through an unhappy married life. She was co-habiting with a boyfriend, Arvind. In interaction with the author, she expressed her resolve to stay single, but he (the author) convinced her of the desirability of marrying Arvind whom she liked so much. He accepted his advice but after marriage she became a victim of cancer.    Luckily she was nursed back to health. Once she became a mother, she gave up her highly-paid job to lead a happy married life. 
After his kaleidoscopic experience around Chennai and later in Bangalore, Kapur shifted to Mumbai where he felt that development was being unkind to the city. He was dismayed by the sights of congested neighbourhoods and acute poverty all around in the metropolis.

  He also describes the woeful environment of the world famous Auroville where his own family suffered badly on account of callous dumping of waste in the neighbourhood. ‘India is burning, eroding, melting, drying, silting up and suffocating. Across the country, rivers, lakes and glaciers are disappearing, underground aquifers getting  depleted, air quality declining and beaches being swept away’, he moans.

  On the problem of garbage, Kapur says that a wholesale transformation is required. The way the government worked needs to be changed and education must instill a sense of civic consciousness in children. It was a wonder to him that ‘a population capable of maintaining ritualistic levels of hygiene at home’ dumps ‘its garbage on the streets without any compunction.’

  Finally, love of the country overwhelms him as he concludes: ‘I had returned from America full of enthusiasm. I celebrated what I saw as the rejuvenation of my home. Later, the enthusiasm started eroding; the rejuvenation appeared to be an illusion. My optimism turned to skepticism, occasionally bordering on despair’.  He acknowledged that he had perhaps rushed to judgment. India did not lend itself to easy judgments…modern India was changing…the nation was on a journey, going through the contradictions of a rapid, and inevitably messy, transformation. Who could say where the journey was headed!

( The book review was first published in the monthly magazine of political affairs the ' Lokayat' (April, 2013 issue)