Drop in Ocean

Drop in the ocean

My first conversations with new students coming to Webster University Thailand:

-XYZ: “So how long have you been in Thailand?”
-V: “Umm…more than 10 years.”
-XYZ: “Really?”
-V: Yah. Well, you see, I was born in India but brought up here. I’ve done my entire schooling at an international school in Bangkok.”
-XYZ: “So you know how to speak Thai.”
-V (face turning tomato red with embarrassment): “Umm…not really, I mean, I can understand but my verbal Thai is not very good.”
-XYZ: “Really, I guessed 10+ years would be enough for one to learn a language.”

And there I stand, embarrassed to death. And then come the questions haunting me: Should I really be embarrassed, after all, I studied at an international school, and live in what can be best described as ‘little India’ away from India; my parents can, to a certain extend, converse in Thai. But what does that have to do with me, I am what I am, and therefore should know how to speak in Thai by now. And now my memory goes down to the lane of RIS, where I remember just a couple of years back, there were rumors that RIS is going to turn completely into a Thai school, but the reality was that the school administration was starting to practice a law (which was compulsory and should have implemented since the start) that they were ignoring till now which was: all international schools had to have Beginner’s Thai classes for foreign students. Makes sense, and now I just wish that they had done that before, it would save me so much of embarrassment. Well, I’m an NRI, ’int it. And that brings me to the next big issue, that of NRIs.

NRI: Non-Resident Indian or is it really, Non-Returning Indian? Call me what you want, I’m more proud to be an Indian than a NRI. NRI has become more of a social status-symbol than anything else. ‘O! You are a NRI; then you must have the ‘name-fame-and hari patti’. Must we? After having a opportunity to study abroad, live abroad, isn’t it our duty; I repeat, not what we should do, but our duty to in some manner or the other go back to our ‘Mother India’ and give back to the community we come from.

Our colony can be mistaken for any other colony in Indore, Chennai, Kolkotta, or any other developed city in India. With the recently build Laxmi-Narayan Mandir, it doesn’t even feel that we are living outside India. But don’t the kids, aunties and to a certain extent even the uncles (who are in their own worlds of peroxide, sulfur and fiber) get excited at the thought of going to India for the summer vacation. And don’t our eyes get moist just at the thought of thinking of our homes and relatives back in India? You might say that it all looks good from here, but once reality strikes, well, ‘jhor ka jaatka, dhere se lage’. With our comfortable lifestyles here; maids who help mummys keep the house clean; no exact electricity and water bills; AC cars; when we return to India, life sometimes gets hard.

“With all the pollution, dirty roads, poverty, heat, corruption, who would want to go back and live when we have a better life here?” True, why should we go through the trouble that the common Indian man lives everyday; we are NRIs, aren’t we?

Hmm..can India give us everything that our Residential colony has over here? Of course, why not. The only hitch in that is that people have to go back and do the work. I know that it is not easy, but life is not easy. If life gives you lemons, go ahead and make lemonade. If even a small percentage of NRIs go back to India and just TRY to make a difference, a lot can happen. Not just in monetary donations when some natural disaster hits India, but in the actual forming a better India, in helping INDIA SHINNING. I don’t know about the others but I definitely am going to try and go back and settle down in India. I might not succeed but at least I can say that I tried.

A drop in the ocean might be small, but the ripples run far.