iBania

I understand practical choices. 

I understand why the best of Indians line up in scorching Chennai heat and fawn over consulate clerks for Visa stamping. I understand why we Indians make hundreds of rounds of "Visa Balaji" in Hyderabad. It's tad bit too much to expect a software slave to prey "Where the head is held high" to his defeated God. That's understandable.

What is not understandable is why we are so awfully proud of these choices. I stay in Bay Area these days and I might want to stay here longer and this place being a great place notwithstanding, I never for a moment felt proud about it. I don't see my moving here as me going places. Migrating is not "going places". There is no pride in Indians fleeing India. If anything, it's an admission of collective failure. It proves a colonial point that we Indians are incapable of building a system that we want to live in. And that's not at all flattering. The better ones among us should feel humiliated, not at personal level of course, but collectively.

But we loudly publish "moved to San Francisco" on Facebook. We are proud of what we should be ashamed of. We have a strange and skewed sense of pride and shame. And superficial sense of belongingness and collective. That's why our whole is much less that the sum of our parts. And that pretty much explains why we are the way we are.