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The Greatest Indian Mystery of the Millenum Explored by an exiled Bengali aristocrat and lover of Calcutta
[In my blog – http://wordsmithofbengal.wordpress.com , I raised a question in an entry http://wordsmithofbengal.wordpress.com/2009/12/09/the-missing-commentary-indians-in-us/ as why we don’t have any enduring commentary inspite of million of Indians who had gone to the United States for last forty years. Dipanjan provided some ‘answers’. – Editor]
The Hypothesis and classification:
I have been thinking about this and have been trying (mostly in vain) to gather my thoughts. I have a hypothesis to offer. In that age group that you mention, there are, I believe 2 prominent groups – A) the under-graduates (majority of them are engineering/science under-grads who traveled on merit, and a small section of non-engineering undergrads to study humanities, law or commerce, coming mostly from affluent families) who were chasing a career of opulence; and B) the post-doctoral fellows (a smaller group of highly motivated and talented set of individuals, not knowing as if, there existed a life beyond studies). There have been a third category C) young, unskilled or semi-skilled men mostly from west and north-west Indian communities, who somehow wanted to land in the west (more often than not illegally) and wanted to take up odd jobs to sustain themselves and save some dollars that can later be shown off to their poorer country-cousins back home.
I will not consider this group-C in this context, because the topic in question implicitly considers a minimal amount of intellect in people, which the group-C had mostly been bereft of.
The Potential Class and the Cause of Missing the Commentary
If you look at the group A, they were a bunch of young men on purpose. They were hardly romantic travelers and observers. By the way, I would prefer to clock the period back by at least one more decade, by when the euphoria of the young nation were on the wane. There was a growing middle class miffed and disillusioned by the corruption in polity and bureaucracy, wanted to take things up on their own and unilaterally decided that flight from this plight was their way of go-getting salvation. Since 70’s till date the so called talent pool who ventured out of the country, has mostly been a group of individualistic, opportunist population (yours truly included). High on the intoxication of success and wealth (of the west), this has been a set of energetic achievers. They have always been under tremendous pressure (from peers, family and above all themselves) to perform. When you are under pressure to perform, you hardly have any creative freedom. A masterpiece cannot be created by executing a Microsoft Project schedule. It is rather nurtured in chaos, madness, passion and creative-conceit. This group-A have been too dispassionate for that. You will see, traditionally, Indians abroad have done splendidly well in business – be it Indian restaurants or the Arcelor-Mittals of the world. Half of the top 10 VCs in the US are Indians.
Still we could pin higher hopes on the group-B: These group possessed higher amount of intellect. Albeit much smaller in proportion, I believe this group has had the potential to think romantically. They had the leisure of time, space for creative freedom. Unfortunately this group possibly under the influence of western affluence has turned materialistic, realistic, goal-oriented at the cost of creativity. Forget social or literary commentary or contributions in the fields of fine or performing arts. Even in the field of science and technology (engineering and medicine included), I don’t remember having celebrated too many Nobel-laureates, inventors, evangelists from the Indian expatriates – there are of course odd examples of the Amartya Sens, Venkatarmans, Vinod Khoslas and Vindo Dhams of the world. That hardly constitutes a penny respectable proportion of the whole. I think we as a people, had been conformists than otherwise – followers than rebels. We are scared to walk away from the trodden path. We are economically, socially conservative and morally pervert. We think more about tomorrow than today, more about our children than ourselves, more about the cost than the value. We are slaves to our minds – in a way we possess a Talibanized soul. The way to come out of this slavery is to put the individual value-system in place. Time, we revisited the lessons of the Geeta.
Final words
I take refuge to the Guru himself…
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake
Dipanjan is a technocrat, thinker and cultural commentator based in Bangalore. This is his first contribution for Pentasect. Earlier he and Shomik co-authored a Sweet Guide of Calcutta here at http://personal.vsnl.com/calcutta/calsweet.htm. Dipanjan Dutta can be contacted at Dipanjan.Dutta@ccpu.com