Kusum Choppra

Decades after we outgrew what used to be an annual begging bowl exercise to extricate foreign aid from developed donors, India this week returned to the Begging Bowl syndrome;   this time with prospective NRI donors during the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas extravaganza. Chief minister after chief minister, central ministers and bigwigs of India Inc. presented the NRIs with a smorgasbord of investment options of every variety.   They cheerfully ran down each other to get ahead of the pack, extolling their own backyards, conveniently forgetting the sorry record of both state and private enterprises. Nary a word uttered on what the NRIs might want or need, any problems they might be facing in their own homelands with their respective administrations.   Don’t we all know how little India does for its citizens abroad; what of Persons of Indian Origin scattered around the world? Do those persons actually consider themselves Indians first, after generations in far-flung post...

Just over two weeks in Singapore, reading their major mainstream newspaper Straits Times every single day left me with a sorry conclusion: Indian Singaporeans and migrants are the invisibles of Singapore.    Reading the thirty odd pages of the newspaper leaves the impression that despite their longevity in that island, persons of Indian descent have not made any noteworthy contribution to the nation state, economically, politically, socially, culturally, in the arena of sports, arts, whatever……. Despite the wholehearted embrace of the system by younger generations, be it medicine, banking, teaching, industry, retail, special needs, real estate, education, the media and events …. You name it and the young people are doing it. There is little news of India in newspapers dominated by immediate neighbors, Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam etc.   India only shows up with rape reports and bad news.   When I spoke of some developmeents, my young ...

My mother found it very difficult to wrap her mind around my later day dressing sense, especially cotton clothes. In the Ahmedabad where I have lived for over four decades, cotton is the norm, summer and winter – just thinner or thicker.   And Ma lived her life in silks, satins, chiffons, crepe d’chines and velvets.   As a pampered daughter of an importer/exporter of fine fabrics and accessories from all over the Far East and Europe, I too had grown up in the finest of clothes.       Until Ahmedabad taught me the value of cottons to cope with hot weather.    The varieties seemingly endless and the comfort so endearing.   Besides I ran an outfit that tailored everything for a handloom and handicraft   organization, Gurjari …..  How could I possibly wear anything but cottons?   The wonder of block prints, with vegetable dyes taking on so many different hues, different for each village with its own soil and water chemistr...

Holding a new book in your hands is a visceral experience, akin to holding a new baby.  One that is a celebration of women determined to lead life to the full is more exuberant. That is what my book NIRBHAYA & OTHERS WHO DARED is all about --- a pean of hope to combat the trauma of December 2012’s Nirbhaya.    Add to that tadka of helping young students to achieve new goals and life suddenly become exciting. When Nirbhaya started malingering with the publishers, I devoted myself an NGO, Balajanaagraha devoted to inculcating citizenship into young minds bored with the mind numbing civics textbooks. After days of rounds of school, four schools agreed to take the leap forward and I was getting up unusually early to trot forth to a different school every day of the week with my bag of tricks. High point: two days after the launch of my new Nirbhaya book, on December 2, 2014 my students presented their civic projects, written and oral before a jury of three. ...

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...