Excuse Us ................We are Indian!

It must have been more than two decades back............yes, exactly...........give or take a year or two. A magical summer where we went to Texas, and like sensible little Indians made a trip to the Nasa Space Centre, Houston. The turning point in my life should have been the whole new world of the stars opening out in front of my eyes in the first world American wizardry.

No....for me it was the moment we chose to walk across the sprawling grounds of NASA, not on the designated pathways like good tourists but on the deliciously green grass. As the jaunty third officer and radio officer of our ship put it, our small little rebellion was pardonable because, 'excuse us ...................we are Indian."

While in many ways that rambunctious duo has formed my opinion of men, at an impressionable age......I love bad boys still!...............It also goes on to prove our own perception of ourselves. Mine has changed with time. I have ceased to be apologetic about a lot of things that irk a foreign eye. I dont care to explain to them about our social and class systems any more, I simply refuse to put up with their rants and raves about our lack of infrastructure, (and still they come here...need I say more?), and I cannot abide being asked questions that begin with, "Do all Indians...............?". There is actually no such thing as all Indians. In fact Indians would scratch their head in puzzzlement if you asked them to explain fellow countrypeople to a foreigner. How can you expect to classify and categorize a trillion people in one sentence like a genus of butterflies, moths or sundry insects? Its myopic.

In this respect I think my son's generation has it better. They seem more able to express themselves and they have a confidence we lacked. Our parents of course lived in terror of upsetting status quo and apple carts, the fact that thye had been born slaves and were freed while they walked or crawled as infants still lies somewhere under their skin. Perhaps that is why their generation slaved and scrimped and survived in foriegn lands struggling for citizenships, green cards, work permits, mortgages and worked their way up the ladder.

In the past few months I have met two young women, who went to western countries to seek their fortune and want to come back. They admit to noticing an invisible glass ceiling that has always existed but never been acknowledged, and now they want to come back, to an environment where they get to be at peak, and get to have a go at trying to reach higher. Something they cannot do in the host country they stay in.

Maybe its time we started accepting ourselves, loving ourselves a little more, and giving in to our baser impulses. No on caught us when we walked on that grass that afternoon. It saved us an additional twenty minutes in the sun and well..................it felt Indian!