Salam, http://www.nytimes. New York Times INDIA CALLING By ANAND
GIRIDHARADAS Published: November 22, 2008 “WHAT are Papa and I doing here?”
These words, instant-messaged by my mother
in a suburb of Washington, D.C., whizzed through the deep-ocean
cables and came to me in the village where I’m now living, in the
country that she left.
It was five years ago that I left America to
come live and work in India. Now, in our family and among our
Indian-American friends, other children of immigrants are exploring
motherland opportunities. As economies convulse in the West and jobs
dry up, the idea is spreading virally in émigré homes.
Which raises a heart-stirring question: If
our parents left India and trudged westward for us, if they
manufactured from scratch a new life there for us, if they slogged,
saved, sacrificed to make our lives lighter than theirs, then what
does it mean when we choose to migrate to the place they forsook?
If we are here, what are they doing there?
They came of age in the 1970s, when the
“there” seemed paved with possibility and the “here” seemed
paved with potholes. As a young trainee, my father felt frustrated in
companies that awarded roles based on age, not achievement. He looked
at his bosses, 20 years ahead of him in line, and concluded that he
didn’t want to spend his life becoming them.
My parents married in India and then
embarked to America on a lonely, thrilling adventure. They learned
together to drive, shop in malls, paint a house. They decided who and
how to be. They kept reinventing themselves, discarding the
invention, starting anew. My father became a management consultant,
an entrepreneur, a human-resources executive, then a Ph.D. candidate.
My mother began as a homemaker, learned ceramics, became a ceramics
teacher and then the head of the art department at one of
Washington’s best schools.
It was extraordinary, and ordinary: This is
what America did to people, what it always has done.
My parents brought us to India every few
years as children. I relished time with relatives; but India always
felt alien, impenetrable, frozen.
Perhaps it was the survivalism born of
scarcity: the fierce pushing to get off the plane, the miserliness
even of the rich, the obsession with doctors and engineers and the
neglect of all others. Perhaps it was the bureaucracy, the need to
know someone to do anything. Or the culture shock of servitude: a
child’s horror at reading “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in an American
middle school, then seeing servants slapped and degraded in India.
My firsthand impression of India seemed to
confirm the rearview immigrant myth of it: a land of impossibilities.
But history bends and swerves, and sometimes swivels fully around. India, having fruitlessly pursued command
economics, tried something new: It liberalized, privatized,
globalized. The economy boomed, and hope began to course through
towns and villages shackled by fatalism and low expectations.
America, meanwhile, floundered. In a blink
of history came 9/11, outsourcing, Afghanistan, Iraq, Katrina, rising
economies, rogue nuclear nations, climate
change, dwindling oil, a financial
crisis.
Pessimism crept into the sunniest nation. A
vast majority saw America going astray. Books heralded a
“Post-American World.” Even in the wake of a historic
presidential election, culminating in a dramatic change in direction,
it remained unclear whether the United States could be delivered from
its woes any time soon.
“In the U.S., there’s a crisis of
confidence,” said Nandan Nilekani, co-chairman of Infosys
Technologies, the Indian software giant. “In India,” he added,
“for the first time after decades or centuries, there is a sense of
optimism about the future, a sense that our children’s futures can
be better than ours if we try hard enough.”
My love for the country of my birth has
never flickered. But these new times piqued interest in my ancestral
land. Many of us, the stepchildren of India, felt its change of
spirit, felt the gravitational force of condensed hope. And we came.
Exact data on émigrés working
in India or spending more time here are scarce. But this is one
indicator: India unveiled an Overseas Citizen of India card in 2006,
offering foreign citizens of Indian origin visa-free entry for life
and making it easier to work in the country. By this July, more than
280,000 émigrés had signed up, according to The
Economic Times, a business daily, including 120,000 from the United
States At first we felt confused by India’s
formalities and hierarchies, by British phraseology even the British
had jettisoned, by the ubiquity of acronyms. We wondered what
newspapers meant when they said, “INSAT-4CR in orbit, DTH to get a
boost.” (Apparently, it meant a satellite would soon beam
direct-to-home television signals.)
Working in offices, some of us were
perplexed to be invited to “S&M conferences,” only to
discover that this denoted sales and marketing. Several found to
their chagrin that it is acceptable for another man to touch your
inner thigh when you crack a joke in a meeting.
We learned new expressions: “He is on
tour” (Means: He is traveling. Doesn’t mean: He has joined U2.);
“What is your native place?” (Means: Where did your ancestors
live? Doesn’t mean: What hospital delivered you?); “Two minutes”
(Means: An hour. Doesn’t mean: Two minutes.).
We tried to reinvent ourselves, as our
parents had, but in reverse. Some studied Hindi, others yoga.
Some visited the Ganges to find themselves; others tried days-long
meditations.
Many of us who shunned Indian clothes in
youth began wearing kurtas and chappals, saris and churidars. There
was a sad truth in this: We had waited for our heritage to become
cool to the world before we draped its colors and textures on our own
backs.
We learned how to make friends here, and
that it requires befriending families. We learned to love here: Men
found fondness for the elusive Indian woman; women surprised
themselves in succumbing to chauvinistic, mother-spoiled men.
We forged dual-use accents. We spoke in
foreign accents by default. But when it came to arguing with
accountants or ordering takeout kebabs, we went sing-song Indian.
We gravitated to work specially suited to
us. If there is a creative class, in Richard Florida’s phrase,
there is also emerging what might be called a fusion class: people
positioned to mediate among the multiple societies that claim them.
India’s second-generation returnees have
built boutiques that fuse Indian fabrics with Western cuts, founded
companies that train a generation to work in Western companies,
become dealmakers in investment firms that speak equally to Wall
Street and Dalal Street, mixed albums that combine throbbing tabla
with Western melodies.
Our parents’ generation helped India from
afar. They sent money, advised charities, guided hedge-fund dollars
into the Bombay Stock Exchange. But most were too implicated in India
to return. Our generation, unscathed by it, was freer to embrace it.
Countries like India once fretted about a
“brain drain.” We are learning now that “brain circulation,”
as some call it, may be more apt.
India did not export brains; it invested
them. It sent millions away. In the freedom of new soil, they
flowered. They seeded a new generation that, having blossomed, did
what humans have always done: chase the frontier of the future.
Which just happened, for many of us, to be
the frontier of our own pasts. (*)
Artikel ini menegaskan bahwa tidak ada yang namanya "brain drain". yang
ada hanya "brain circulation"
salam,
K
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