Posts

Showing posts from December, 2009

expats or traitors?

When we were kids we often heard the tale of “kutti mein mutti”, of the little boy who was reluctant to leave a game of marbles to go to pee, incase someone cheated on him. So he peed into the little hole, dug in the ground as ‘goal’, so the game would be disrupted and then could begin afresh after he relieved himself properly. One is tempted to believe this is the attitude of expats from their homelands in underdeveloped countries. First they fleece the home country for subsidized quality education which wins them seats in foreign universities, jobs et all. And then, once they have settled in, instead of trying to do something constructive for the homeland, they fish in troubled waters, funding separatist movements and airing various theories with little knowledge of ground realities beyond the eerie word pictures of concerned relatives. There is often little awareness of the larger picture of a massive Indian subcontinent with all its myriad peoples and their equally myriad probl