Being proudly Indian
I have always been very proud of being an Indian to the core. Despite a lifetime in the Far East, my father, a proud media man in the INA (Indian National Army of Subhas Chandra Bose), never gave up his Indian passport. In college, I even won a Femina Best Letter award for a letter in which I wrote that I felt truly Indian because few people recognized me as a Sindhi. Most took me for Punjabi, Maharashtrian, Bengali, even Muslim, depending on the clothes I was wearing when I met them. Then I became even more Indian: a Sindhi married a Punjabi, children born and bred in Gujarat, a Sindhi-Parsi son in law, a Sindhi-Gujarati daughter in law and another Kashmiri. Sara Hindustan Hamara!! I was born in Singapore and brought up in Jakarta, Indonesia. That made for an Overseas Indian mentality which looks back at India with a romantic attitude, enhanced memories of a happy childhood and detailed ones of India’s drawbacks. Fortu...