MUMBAI, India — The first thing I learned about India was that my parents had chose to leave it. My cousins in India would sometimes ask if I was Indian or American. “American,” I would say, because that was the truth, and because if I felt to say otherwise, I would feel less confident of myself.
I moved to India six years ago in an effort to understand it with my own eyes, to render my previous knowledge of the country obsolete and outdated. India had changed when I arrived and has changed dramatically and radically in the past 2,000 days: farms turning into factories; ultra-cheap cars being built; companies buying out rivals abroad. But the greatest change I witnessed was elsewhere. It was in the mind: Indians now know that they don’t have to leave, whereas my parents left, to have their personal revolutions.
It took me time to see. At first, my old lenses were still in place — India, the frustrating and difficult country — and so I only saw the things I wanted to see. But as I traveled the land, my expectations were surpassed. Children of the lower castes were hoisting themselves up one diploma and training program at a time. Women were becoming general managers through microcredits and decentralized manufacturing. Young people were finding their phones as the front zone of individual identity. Couples were ending marriages no matter what “society” thinks, then finding love again. The vegetarians were embracing meat and meat-eaters were turning vegetarian, defining themselves by taste and faith, not caste. Indians from humble villages were moving to sprawling cities. These were the difficult and new choices they were facing, like choosing where to live the rest of your life other than where they were born, to pursue education and better employment rather their ancestors', to live lives imagined within their own dream. And it was addictive, this erratic rush of hope.
This shift is only just beginning. Most Indians still live bleak and grim lives. But it is a shift in psychology and mindset, you rarely meet an Indian untouched by it. Grabbing hold of their destinies, these Indians became the unlikely cousins of my own immigrant parents in America: restless, ambitious, and with dreams vivid only to their imagination. But my parents had sought to beat the odds in a bad system. What has changed since they left is the systemic lifting of the odds for those who stay. It is a milestone in any nation’s life when leaving becomes a choice, not a necessity.
[Indians] no longer angrily berate America, because they are too busy building their own country. Indian accents are now cooler than British ones, in my opinion. No one asks if I feel Indian or American. How captivating it would be to hear that question. How fortunate it would be to live in a land where you need not to leave in order to live your life in full.
