Living in India one can hardly live a day without hearing about some or the other personality making it big in the world and being of Indian origin.
My first response to such articles and news items was joy at knowing that Indians are doing something substantial. Sundar Pichai gave hope to thousands of programmers in India.
After a while though the term began to bother me. Indian origin. The words mean that the person was not from India but his/her roots could be traced back to us. I felt like an ape rejoicing that humans went to the moon, because of ape-origin.
What I realized is that all these things had motivated us for the wrong reasons. They had never lived in the conditions we live in. They did not know India like we do. All they had were distant roots in this country that we live in and survive everyday.
It means at some level that those people or their ancestors chose to leave this country due to some reasons. It might be that they found the other more lucrative or that they were frustrated with this one. What the essence of my rant is that this country was not good enough.
If indeed we want to celebrate the Indian origin success story we should keep in mind that what we are celebrating is not the success of the country in that field, rather the success of the country in producing a child who could do amazing things but had to leave the country in order to do so.
Sundar might have grown up here but in order to do great things, he had to leave India.
My first response to such articles and news items was joy at knowing that Indians are doing something substantial. Sundar Pichai gave hope to thousands of programmers in India.
After a while though the term began to bother me. Indian origin. The words mean that the person was not from India but his/her roots could be traced back to us. I felt like an ape rejoicing that humans went to the moon, because of ape-origin.
What I realized is that all these things had motivated us for the wrong reasons. They had never lived in the conditions we live in. They did not know India like we do. All they had were distant roots in this country that we live in and survive everyday.
It means at some level that those people or their ancestors chose to leave this country due to some reasons. It might be that they found the other more lucrative or that they were frustrated with this one. What the essence of my rant is that this country was not good enough.
If indeed we want to celebrate the Indian origin success story we should keep in mind that what we are celebrating is not the success of the country in that field, rather the success of the country in producing a child who could do amazing things but had to leave the country in order to do so.
Sundar might have grown up here but in order to do great things, he had to leave India.
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