keeping in theme with the current movie flavour ( case in point: the namesake and the bong connection) i thought i too would try to explore my roots too. p.s. this is no desertion or study about the movies, that i'll have to leave for another day. today i want to try and figure out two very basic questions," who am i" and "where do i belong".
i always thought that the answers to the afore mentioned questions were very simple. i am an indian and i belong to india. but with an increasing astonishment i have come to see that it's not enough. the fact that i am a bangali is so ingrained in my identity that i have seen it very often take precedence over the fact that i am an indian.
albeit i am a second generation bangalorean born in libya yet bangalore is not as far from kolkata as boston so why do i feel so alienated in my own ancestral city.
evrything from the language to the culture is as alien to me as to gogol ganguly. it's not that i have never been to kolkata ( or as i'd rather call it calcutta and no that's not a colonial hangup it's just that i happen to think that the name gave it that balance) infact i visit it almost once a year and all my relatives live there. it's just that i have grown up among migrant bangalis who created their own kolkata here far away from home ( remember that the telecom revolution took place in the late nineties and in the sixties Bangalore seemed a far away from kolkata as maybe Beijing). it was a new world , small compared to the cal of then , with sour food, quite people who slept at 8pm and as my mother likes to say , the kind of weather which made u forget that fans existed...... it was unheard of, absurd. yet they survived and brought up their childen as best as they could remember their parents bringing them up. they had their pujos and poites. their mukhebhaths and momos. and not very seldom their rabindra sangeet.
so i won't say i am a i.b.c.b.... try to guess that but what i would say is that i am an bangalorean bangali who before everything else is an indian from india.
"jai hind"
