The Expat

These days I am reading 'India : From Midnight to the Millenium and Beyond' by Shashi Tharoor (who is also standing for the Lok Sabha Elections this year). It is an amazing book offering great insights into the contemporary history of the country, and in the events that shaped the present India. I will write a detailed review later, after I have finished the book. But here is an excerpt from the book which I just had to put down on the blog. 

... The explanation for this evident paradox may lie in the very nature of expatriation. Most of the world's emigrants today are people who left their homelands in quest of material improvement, looking for financial security and professional opportunities that, for one reason or another, they could not attain in their own countries. Many of them left intending to return : a few years abroad, a few more dollars in the bank, they told themselves, and they would come back to their own hearths, triumphant over the adversity that had led them to leave. But the years kept stretching on, and the dollars were never quite enough, or their needs mounted with their acquisitions, or they developed new ties (career, wife, children, schooling) to their new land, and then gradually the realization seeped in that they would never go back. And with this realization, often only half-acknowledged, came a welter of emotions : guilt at the abandonment of the motherland, mixed with rage that the motherland had somehow - through its own failings, political, economic, social - forced them into this abandonment. The attitude of the expatriate to his homeland is that of the faithless lover who blames the woman he has spurned for not having sufficiently merited his fidelity. 

That is why the support of extremism at home is doubly gratifying : it appeases the expatriate's sense of guilt at not being involved in his homeland, and it vindicates his decision to abandon it. (If the homeland he has left did not have the faults he detests, he tells himself, he would not have had to leave it.) But that is not all. The expatriate also desperately needs to define himself in his new society. He is reminded by his mirror, if not by the nationals of his own land, that he is not entirely like them. In the midst of racism and alienation, second-class citizenship and self-hatred, he needs an identity to assert - a label of which he can be proud, yet which does not undermine his choice of exile. He has rejected the reality of his country but not, he declares fervently, the essential values he has derived from his roots. As his children grow up "American" or "British", as they slough off the assumptions, prejudices, and fears of his own childhood, he becomes even more assertive about them. But his nostalgia is based on the selectiveness of memory; it is a simplified, idealized recollection of his roots, often reduced to their most elemental - family, caste, religion. In exile among foreigners, he clings to a vision of what he really is that admits no foreignness.

But the tragedy is that the culture he remembers, with both nostalgia and rejection, has itself evolved - in interaction with others - on its national soil. His perspective distorted by exile, the expatriate knows nothing of this. His view of what used to be home is divorced from the experience at home. The expatriate is no longer an organic part of the culture, but a severed digit that, in its yearning for the hand, can only twist itself into a clenched fist ...

Though the above analysis of the expat might be a bit archaic, it still captures what majority of the diaspora feels. I really do not want to become such an expat.  :(