Here’s the irritating thing about being a son of
the soil expat… that probably requires some sort of clarification, doesn’t it?
Okay – Son of the Soil = born and spent early
childhood Here, India, then whisked off to There, USA. Five plus decades, and
one citizenship change later, back, semi-voluntarily, to Here; which, now that
I think about it, makes me an expatriate squared [xp2], with all of
its horrifying implications.
However...
This is about irritation; the expat irritation, the
itch, deep in one’s soul, when one has to adhere to Guest Conduct, Rules of;
the ones that constrain opinions that might not be in concert with prevailing
cultural trends. Such as, to take a completely random, (honest), example, there
is this business of the rising tide of religiosity in the public weal. There
are folks, good folks, who think that this is a good thing. Folks who, should I
suggest otherwise, take umbrage, quite often in an emphatic and loud manner,
and suggest, in no uncertain terms, that I ought to keep my videshi, that is to say foreign,
opinions to my traitorous self. [Full disclosure – usually when I’m winning
the, uh, discussion.] Admittedly, I’d be a lot less itchy if I was to limit my
political and/or cultural opinions to generalities; oh you know, things like
the universally accepted perfidy of politicians and how things were much
better, culturally, back when… etc.
But, the irreducible fact of the matter is that
culture, and the politics of that culture, have very little, actually, nothing,
to do with national boundaries and visa status. Folks, to paraphrase an ad of
yore, is folks. Where folks are from, what they look like, the time zone they
live in, have as a commonality, a to-the-bone, written-in-the-gene, as-God-is-my-witness
commonality, the human condition. Politics, Culture, and religion are artefacts
of that condition. Artefacts re the, as some social scientists will have it,
the extelligence, the external
manifestations of a particular collective of humans and their conditions. I don’t
see what visa status has to do with having the right to comment on the idi…irra…inadvisability
of a social current that has proven to be harmful, historically and even as we
speak. This seems to be particularly so in the case of Religion and its body
functions, the extelligence of Holy Places [public conditionally invited], mass
gatherings of piety, governance based on Holy Writings notwithstanding.
I rarely get to make that point. It is generally
more prudent to move a few, or more, stools down the bar.
