After a long lull I was suddenly spurred into action mode by a friend's blog on rediff news. This was on how we Indians like to heave ourselves on our long lost to culture, now distant cousins of ethnic Indian origin in other countries.
Be it a Sunita Williams or some one else. Yes ! we fall head over heels to welcome somebody who is of a different country and has only a genetic connection to the Indianness. This was disliked by my friend Raja Baradhwaj in his article saying that we should first care for our own countrymen and then talk about our ethnic cousins elsewhere.
Personally I feel that even though people have left our country they would very much retain the essence of Indianness because it is a subtle bond thicker than blood or genes. If we don't care for them they would drift more farther and after a few generations nothing of them would be ethnic.
I accept the fact that sometimes we go overboard to felicitate people even if they are least interested. A classic example being VS Naipaul who refused to call himself Indian while the whole nation was going gaga over his winning 2001 Nobel award for literature. He rebuffed this overwhelming gesture of we Indians and we as a nation were a flustered lot.
Many ethnic Indians play against us in various sports and games. More particularly cricketers of West Indies have a breed of ethnic Indians playing against us. Why do they play against us at all ? Agreed it is not war but a game but in India cricket is not game but war.
Now coming back to the original story from where it started as a discussion was the ethnic Indian in Malaysia being persecuted. Should we as cousins be bothered or not ? Or do we just ignore the whole episode as an internal matter of a third world country in SE Asia.
These are the times that we stand up and shout hoarse on top of our voices in support of our long lost cousins irrespective of their nationality and willingness to be a part of our culture.
If we don't do it then who else will ?
After all we have a history of intervening into the political affairs for Sri Lanka and losing a prime minister to the machinations of our own cousins named as LTTE.
