I was standing in the bus stop which has now become an eternal pool of ideas for my blogs. Another fellow Indian sat next to me. I smiled at him, but he darted his vision away from my face. After a few seconds he stood there expressionless staring at me like an archer staring at his bull’s eye. I got a feeling if this person had a super sense of seeing through people’s body and I felt transparent.
I smiled again trying to invoke a response at this human face staring at me. He was a statue. I then shifted my sight on an attractive advertisement board glittering away on this lonely and dark street.
The bus was unsurprisingly late and I had to wait that bit longer. In the course of just loitering around I saw this person trying to see what I was upto and was definitely trying to judge me. This made me uncomfortable. All he had to do was just smile back and connect. But he chose not to, but I could sense the curiosity etched on his face trying to find out more about me. I brushed it away as another one of those instances which I have been in before.
In my short stint of living abroad, these kind of situations pop up very frequently. Our own countrymen do not greet each other. There is an inherent fear among Indians living abroad that other Indians tend to stick to them and would ask them for help if they get friendly or even to just exchange courtesies. Why do we forget our human relation values which are praised and so widely spoken about in other cultures?
I don’t see the logic behind this narrow mindset. I think most Indians living abroad have their own competence which helps them get there. Why do we fear people who come from the same motherland elsewhere so much?
I see the division of an Indian society here much more than back home. This is silent and unexpressed but inherently a very strong kind of discrimination because it is led by some of our country’s fine tuned brains. I would like to call it intellectual discrimination. So here we are, half the globe away from our beloved country land and surprisingly (or unsurprisingly!), divided we stand!
1 comment:
I felt little uncomfortable reading this blog. I too belong to the same motherland and I was of the impression that the farther we move away from our motherland the more we identify ourselves with nationality that would bridge us with our compatriots. May be I am wrong in this regard and I admit it because I have never been outta this subcontinent.
The good thing is you digged into the reason for his behavior and let us know. Yes, it has got to do with MONEY. I remember what Sri Shankaracharya, the great Hindu reformer and critic, said about money - "Money is not everything. It doesn't fetch you any happiness, for it can set up a clash with your own son!" It is a more than a thousand year old teaching!
When such is the case, it is no surprise that it made a stranger keep distance with you!
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