Flying east-bound 9000 metres above Germany, I was flipping through a newspaper in the cramped cabin of a transcontinental airliner. There, I found an article on the new trend of 'brain gain', linked to India's Westernised émigrés return home. I was interested: I was on my way to New Delhi to take up studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, having spent the past 18 years, since my childhood, in the United States.
Not so long ago, I had been to my birthplace in Kerala, and the first thing I noticed upon arrival in Delhi was that north India smelled a lot different than south India. I confirmed this sensation soon after, when I travelled to Madras. There, I experienced a slew of Tamil aromas that were close cousins of those smells with which I grew up in Kerala, but were quite different from those in New Delhi.
In the United States, I was always asked about spicy food, Hindi films and the Taj Mahal. Here in New Delhi, I was confronted with challenges as to why I could not speak Hindi, and why I would choose to return to India when everyone 'here' is trying to get 'there'. While I thought I had anticipated India's surprises, I was caught off-guard by some of the things that I found. There were fewer English speakers than I had expected to find on the street, but the number of people for whom English was a primary language (the one in which a person thinks and dreams) greatly exceeded what I had anticipated. The rich were also somewhat richer and the poor were much poorer than I had expected. But the rumours of the heat of the Indian pre-monsoon summer had not been exaggerated in the least.
A good part of my first week on the JNU campus was spent engaged in a favourite Indian past-time – waiting in line at one window or counter after another. Even though my passport declared 'United States', I felt that my brown skin gave me a birthright to complain. The first in-depth conversation that I had with my hostel-mates was emphatically and unapologetically about sex. Asked about the sexual pursuits of Indian men abroad, I shrugged and took a draught from my Kingfisher, hoping in vain to pass on to the next topic. My new friends were shocked that we were not at the top of the sexual food chain – did they (the Americans) not realise that we were from the land of the Kamasutra? They were perplexed, though I would wager that they were going by reputation, rather than having actually read (and practiced from) Vatsyayana's treatise. When Indians themselves/ourselves internalise the exotic, one can hardly blame the foreigners who come seeking the same: bright bazaars and camel festivals in Rajasthan, ayurveda in Keralan backwaters, or the expressive temples of Madhya Pradesh.