If India was my friend on Facebook, would I post “Happy Birthday” on its wall?
Today, August 15th, is Indian Independence Day. It’s a significant day for people in and from India, and insignificant for most of my American peers, and something in the middle for me.
See much like your relationship with a lot of your Facebook friends, I’m not quite sure how important my relationship with India is. Mind you, this isn’t an article about questioning my culture as hyphenated American. As someone who strikes Bollywood poses for pictures, tells friends I’m unavailable on a certain date because I have “brown things” to attend to, and has used the phrase “go hard at the temple” in earnest on many occasions, I’m pretty unapologetically in touch with my Indian culture. Growing up, I would try to tie any school assignment back to India. World Geography presentation on a country? I picked India. Report on a famous world leader? Me and Mahatma Gandhi go way back. Poster on any element in the periodic table? I swear to you I picked Indium because I thought it might have something to do with India (it doesn’t).
But what of my connection to the country itself? Does India’s independence and the nation that resulted have any meaning to me? I’ve been asking myself this question for the past few days and I’ve realized how fluid the answer to it can be.
Ask me who the current Prime Minister of India is and I’ll proudly name him. I’ll also tell you “he’s my boy” because he’s from my parents’ state and we speak the same language. Ask me about his policies and I’ll try to switch the topic because I’m vaguely aware of some going-ons in the country under him that I’d probably disapprove of if I looked into them enough. Bring up the significance of Hillary Clinton being on the verge of becoming America’s first female president and I’ll puff up my chest and tell you about how India elected a female Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, within the first 30 years (I think?) of its democracy. I’ll also hope you don’t follow up with comments about how nepotism may have led to her election or the fact that she may or may not have been a dictator. If you do, I’ll probably just shrug it off because hey, I don’t really know much about her. Watching India flounder in the Olympics doesn’t really bother me. But I guarantee you if Sania Mirza and Rohan Bopanna had medaled, I’d post about it.
If there’s something related to India that I can take pride in, I’ll probably own it. I’m pretty sure this is just a slightly toned down version of a conversation that most Indian immigrants end up having where the conclusion is “everything good in the world came from India.” It’s a little ridiculous but I’m not going to tell them that. After all these are people who were born and brought up there and their nationalism is simply a translation of the pride that causes me to want to start a “U-S-A!” chant at fireworks on the Fourth of July or yell, “Let’s Go ‘Murca!” when our Olympic basketball team ekes out an embarrassingly close win against France. But whereas I react passionately against divisive demagogues and socio-economic inequalities here in the US, my reaction to similar issues in India is non-existent. Part of that dichotomy probably has to do with the fact that issues in the US affect me directly. But discriminatory laws in Indiana and county clerks in Kentucky don’t really affect me and yet I feel some need to speak out against them, publicly or simply with friends, just because they exist within the confines of that nation that I was born and brought up in.
In that sense, my relationship with India is one of convenience. Trumpet the good, ignore the bad and switch effortlessly between the two behaviors. It seems like a flaky friendship but maybe the random TSA scans and questioning looks at my lunch in school that are rooted in my Indian-ness means I’ve taken my lumps and thus I justify my flakiness. Which brings me back to today. I didn’t take much time out of my day to acknowledge India’s independence but I may catch myself humming the Indian national anthem later (thanks to my mom, it’s the first national anthem I learned). And if I’m flipping through the channels and an Olympic match with an Indian badminton player appears, I might watch for a few minutes. Probably only if they’re winning though.
