Of the many dinner and wedding conversations Indian families have, the NRI topic is always hot and steaming. Discussion is rife with who in the family lives abroad, who earns how much and the kind of lifestyle they lead. Along with ruminating over the NRI life, there’s also the undercurrent of judgment that runs straight through— a very blatant disapproval of those who left. They’re not really Indians because they’ve never lived in India or understood Indians, right?
Being an NRI comes with a lifelong, unforgivable burden of loss. When you live outside, in a land you’re never allowed to call your own, you know you’re living your life on borrowed time from another country. Perhaps you left for something better, something India couldn’t give you when you were there. Perhaps it was chance that you were born in a country that didn’t have a distinct mélange of voices and cultures starkly different yet so similar. But India never fails to remind you that you don’t belong.
Defending NRI’s isn’t an onus anybody needs to take but nobody ever thinks about the other side. Nobody realizes that a majority of Indians abroad live very meager, middle class lives that don’t have the space for luxury. Nobody thinks before asking for all the Hershey’s there might be on the planet, even when they don’t know how much it must cost to fly halfway across the world to be scorned by your own people for making a choice.
NRI’s don’t have it any easier than Indians in India. They face their own set of struggles with alienation and identity formation like anybody else does. They constantly attempt to connect with their culture while also attempting to fit in the worlds they live in. They worry for their children, just as all Indians do. And they also wait for the day they can come back; the day India will take them in. But the silence remains in between the lines of dinner parties and wedding functions, where people resent the realities of their life, jealousy plaguing their perceptions. India’s silence about its NRI’s speaks to the quiet knowledge of knowing that the struggle for acceptance will always remain. There are things both sides of the equation want. The world just isn’t small enough for it.
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