“Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” – Barack Obama.

“More than you know it I’m aware,
Of this connection that we share.
I know it seems like sometimes I don’t care,
But you are the colors that I wear” – “3 AM”, Poets of the Fall.

“I’m proud to be an Indian ” – Twitterer, January 26th, 2010.

“You were an Indian in America, and now you’re an American in India. Always confused.” – Neo’s Uncle Abhay on Neo, January 26th 2010.

“What time is Lost?” – Neo, moments ago.

*

On Republic Day, Uncle Abhay kept trying to get Neo to enjoy the parade, but Neo was more interested in spending quality time with his Google Reader, podcasts and wine – only two things were “dry” on Republic Day at Neoville: the municipal water supply, and Abhay’s throat because he couldn’t stop talking.

Uncle Abhay finally gave up: “Are you even an Indian? What the hell are you doing in India? Why did you come here? Aren’t you proud of being an Indian?”.

No.

Neo has plenty of time to listen to Raga Marwa, or wait for his turn at the traffic light, but he has no time to waste watching parades, waving the flag of any country, chanting slogans or reading @nevervotes92’s tweets on how he’s proud of being an Indian. Saying that you are proud of being an Indian isn’t much different than saying you’re proud to be born on a Monday – being an Indian is just a fact, not an achievement to be proud of. Would you be less proud if you were born Romanian, or on a Tuesday ? You could say you’re lucky to be an Indian – millions of Bangladeshis would agree.

The ridiculously sloganeered and caricatured shows of patriotism that occur in India (and every other country) on “national holidays” are an insult to the intelligence of its citizens. What happened to the thoughtful, deep India ? When did we choose gaudy weddings over happy marriages, not-stalgia and past glory over reality, rutty careers over our real aspirations, pretentious religious ceremonies over what they actually mean, deep-fried over grilled, elder-worship over thinking for ourselves, the display of money over tastefulness and rote-memorized slogans over an intuitive understanding of civic duty ? You can get a kid to recite “Mera Bharat Mahan” or the sugary-sweet “All Indians are my brother and sisters” until his face is blue, but he’s still not going to stop throwing his fucking candy wrapper on the road until a parent teaches him to.

And have you noticed ? Around the world, the more pathetic the condition of its citizens, the grander and more pretentious are the patriotic celebrations and the forced, fake statements of pride. If the Martians were watching the parades on TV, they’d think North Korea was the leader of the world. The lipstick on a prostitute gets more garishly red as dawn approaches, or as the drugs wear off.

A few of Neo’s family members and friends serve (proudly) in the Indian armed forces. None of them are impressed by the Facebook status updates, tweets and blog posts proclaiming pride for India on national holidays or disasters. This Republic day, Neo’s friend said “We serve in the army so the rest of you motherfuckers can be safe and change India, not so you can sit around forwarding patriotic songs and feel happy.”

How about we replace all the parades, speeches and sloganeering with a simple ceremony that honors the men and women who would run towards a gunshot rather than away from it ? The ceremony can end in a simple wish – “we honor the Indians who died for our country this year, and we hope our enemies will soon have the opportunity to die in very large numbers for their country.”

Hello, and welcome to Neo’s blog. He is Indian, and he’s proud of many things. But he’s not proud to be an Indian. He just is an Indian.

*

PS: You still like parades ? Here’s a parade that will make you proud, or maybe, if you’re like Neo, laugh uncontrollably and then collapse with sadness:

PS2: Are you proud of this blog post? If you are, you shouldn’t be. You didn’t write it.

How long can Neo call himself a “newly returned Indian” ? It’s been almost three years since he moved to India. But – as Neo said recently to one of his engineers who was denied a promotion – it’s not how long you’ve been doing it, but how well you’ve done it that counts. (Also, it helps if you ask for a promotion when the company is profitable.)

So have you earned your promotion from “Newly Returned Indian” to “Natively Resident Indian” ? Here are 20 signs that you’ve successfully made the transition to living in India:

1. You stop getting out of the car at gas stations petrol pumps.

2. You drive next to a BMW 7-series and don’t notice it. Or you didn’t, until your driver gave you a condescending glance.

3. This year’s Diwali holidays won’t catch you by surprise.

4. You stop walking around the office with a coffee mug in your hand.

5. You wear a sweater in “winter”.

6. You stop asking other drivers for their insurance whenever they bump into your car.

7. You’re ok with paying $20,000 for a crappy, cramped car that takes 30 minutes to go from 0-60.

8. You think it’s perfectly natural for English movies to have English subtitles on HBO India.

9. Someone gets fired if it’s 8pm and there isn’t a 4-course meal on the dinner table.

10. You know the best parking spots are determined by shade from the sun and not by distance. Also, you’ve learned to hold the steering wheel using just your pinky finger.

11. The sound of the maid breaking a wine glass does not bother you because you had the foresight to buy a set of 13 wine glasses.

12. You host your kid’s birthday party at McDonald’s.

13. When there’s a cricket game on, you just turn on the TV instead of  reloading cricinfo.com every 10 seconds.

14. You and your spouse are experts in using “missed calls” to communicate. (1 ring = “on my way home”, 2 rings == “running late”, 3 rings == “just pick up the phone you cheapskate!”, …)

15. You stop hauling around your own luggage around at airports and train stations.

16. Your cell phone has a custom ringtone and caller tune. Also, you stop asking for cell phone numbers and start asking for “mobile”, as in “what’s your mobile?”

17. You barely remember what voicemail is.

18. You stop noticing homeless people.

19. When calling customer service, you confidently announce your name as “Gajanand Shrivatsav” without automatically spelling it out like “G as in Government, A as in Apple …”

20. You stop smiling at strangers in the elevator.

(Don’t feel bad if you’re not doing as well as you thought. Neo is right there behind you.)

Here’s your moment of zen:

In 2004, most of Mrs. Neo’s friends were surprised when she announced that she had broken up with a rather handsome Ganesh and was engaged to marry the very skinny-looking Neo. Yes, they said, Neo was sort of smart, charming and funny, but – he’s so skinny!

It was a brilliant decision by Mrs. Neo – Neo started working out soon after he got married, and the rest is history.

(Single folks are now probably thinking that Mrs. Neo must be thrilled about how things worked out. Married folks of course, know better: There is not one visitor to Neoville that has not heard Mrs. Neo’s 45-minute sob story of how terrible the Neos’ wedding pictures look. Although, encouragingly, yesterday Mrs. Neo did spare the neighbors cousin who just happened to stop by for some sugar. Neo’s frantic silent-begging motions from the other room might have also helped.)

Tongues will always wag, but the truth is that Neo had nothing to do with Mrs. Neo’s decision to dump “part ways amicably with” Ganesh. That was all Ganesh’s doing. As the average reader* will probably agree, haranguing Mrs. Neo constantly about how she was damaging the environment every time she dried her hair wasn’t exactly the best way to soften her up for a marriage proposal.

(* Not that Neo has any average readers – all of Neo’s readers are above average, especially when it comes to patiently waiting for Neo’s next post.)

The breaking point for Mrs. Neo was probably when she came home one day and discovered that Ganesh had entered her apartment using his copy of her apartment keys (oh yes, they had exchanged keys, and almost rings), and thrown out her brand-new Calphalon cooking set – because he felt strongly that “steel is healthier than Teflon!”. Perhaps Ganesh should have done what all sensible men do – wait until after he got married to let out his inner control-freak.

But this post is not about gloating or about pointing out that Ganesh is still single. Nor is this post about the priceless look on Mrs. Neo’s friends’ faces when they see the “neo-Neo physique” – it is about India, specifically India vs China:

Don’t let the make-love-not-pollution liberals fool you – there is an epic competition brewing between India and China. Economic growth is not a zero-sum game, but there is a limited supply of oil, food, water. skilled labor and demand for shoddily cheaply manufactured goods in the world.

At its heart, any bet on India (such as investing in India, or moving to India for career reasons) is a bet that (much like Neo’s shoulder measurements) India’s problems, while serious, can be fixed in the not-so-distant future.

There is little doubt that China is ahead today, and much “hotter” than India right now – but India’s problems are fundamentally different from China’s:

Neo can argue (and is arguing) that it is easier to increase growth and fix infrastructure/governance issues when you have a fundamentally free and a highly educated population (i.e. India) than it is to try and control a repressed and un-free people forever by bribing them with fake economic growth (i.e. China).

Neo’s day job allows him some access to Indian government officials, and one of them remarked to him last week – “the problem with China is that its GDP growth numbers are decided three years in advance, while the problem in India is that we can’t agree on what the GDP growth numbers were three years ago.”

Yes, this is the age of Twitter, and so like most other things in life, the India vs China problem can be reduced to a 140-character bumper sticker:  “I may be fat, but you’re ugly and I can diet!.”

Epilogue: Yes, Neo does sound like an Indian fanboy at times. Well, at least he didn’t have to hack through a poor-Cisco-imitation firewall (yes I’m looking at you, Huawei) and risk death-by-being-eaten-alive-by-worms or worse, death-by-being-forced-to-eat-worms just by posting this.

(Disclaimer: No skinny people were insulted in this post. Also, Mrs. Neo now says it is untrue that skinny men are unattractive. It would be nice if Mrs. Neo had realized this 78,344 hours in sweaty gyms and $19351.23 ago).

It takes Neo’s special grasp of the English language to understand that when Mrs. Neo says “Fine!” at the end of an argument, it is neither the end of the argument, nor does it mean that things are “fine”.

Image via Wikipedia

It is the same, sophisticated, auto-antonym-grokking intelligence that allows Neo to understand how he can be an “Overseas Citizen of India” without being overseas, or being a citizen of India!

The clearest explanation of this “(not-always-)Overseas (non-)Citizenship of India” comes not from the Indian government, but from the storied makers of the green-card-that-is-not-green, i.e. the US government, which informs us:

“… an American who obtains [the Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI)] is not a citizen of India and remains a citizen of the United States […] An OCI card in reality is similar to a U.S. “green card” in that a holder can travel to and from India indefinitely […]”

Image via Wikipedia

But the Indian Government is remarkably consistent in its desire to make everything sound and look exactly the opposite of what it is, because the physical OCI card looks exactly like a passport, except it’s not a passport.

Now, you might think that carrying around things-that-look-like-passports-but-aren’t is really no big deal, but that’s because you didn’t have to face the Singapore immigration official whose eyes narrowed to the sorts of apertures that are usually associated with a pinhole camera when he saw 6 multi-colored passports tumble out of Neo’s passport pouch – for a family of 3.

But you can’t really blame the Singaporean official – after all, when the newly-OCI-endowed Neo arrived in India (in late 2005), the first reaction from the Indian immigration official who saw Neo’s OCI card was, “Why were you standing in the foreigners line ? You’re an Indian citizen!”.

(On subsequent visits to India this error has been corrected, and now the Indian immigration officials regard Neo with the same surly, if-you-didn’t-visit-so-often-we-wouldn’t-be-so-busy stare, just like all the other  “OMG its our first time to India, Megan stop staring at that man right now or we’re flying back to Baltimore!” foreigners waiting patiently in line.)

And so it is that sometimes words can come to mean the exact opposite of what they mean – last weekend when Neo remarked that his mother-in-law’s rasam was fine, Mrs. Neo stormed out of the room – probably angered more by Neo’s correct use of the word “fine” than the slight to the hallowed rasam.

(No prizes for guessing the last word that came out of Mrs. Neo’s mouth just before she stormed out).

PS: For those of you who are still struggling with the various meanings of the word “fine”, this video is a must-watch (gulp down that coffee first).

“Great job!” said Neo Jr, when Neo accidentally broke the Mikasa fruit bowl (the kind you get when you have no idea what to gift someone) into 18,433 pieces. It’s not like you need more proof that Neo’s son is smarter than yours, but come on, how gifted is a child who can be sarcastic at 4?

So Neo Jr’s 4th birthday party was mostly a success, but Neo was disappointed he couldn’t meet as many hot moms potential play-date partners for Neo Jr as he’d have liked – many kids arrived with a maid to watch them. Neo was a little offended and very amused when he found out that many of the moms had their own party, hanging out at a new Thai spa. (Offended because he wasn’t invited, and very amused that Mrs. Neo wasn’t!)

But yes, two years after moving to Bangalore, it’s been a “challenge” (don’t you just love euphemistic management jargon?) for the Neos to diversify their friends circle away from other US-returned people. (It’s getting tiring – there’s only so many times Neo can feign laughter at the “Oh let’s get cake from the Prolific Oven!”, “Oh right I forgot we don’t live in the Bay Area!, hahaha” genre of jokes.)

Neo’s neighbors (many of whom have never lived outside India), would be a great natural addition to his list of friends (and be a great source of convenient next-door play dates for Junior), but there are huge differences.

Here’s just one example: safety.

Neo’s neighbors are fine with a 1:6 adult:child ratio while going to a public park. Neo prefers a 6:1 ratio – he assigns one pair of Neo Jr’s grandparents to monitor the exits, the other pair of grandparents to set up a perimeter, while Neo pushes the swing. (Mrs. Neo, like the US government in almost any international crisis, helps by “monitoring the situation closely”.)

(Neo had equipped the Neo Jr Secret Service with their own wireless communication earsets, but abandoned the plan after the following security incident: Neo’s father-in-law figured out how to listen to cricket commentary on his earset, resulting in him gazing into space while a wayward frisbee landed  inside the 10-feet “no-fly” zone around Neo Jr.)

There are other issues too – Mrs. Neo abruptly terminated a play date at one of the neighbors’ when the neighbor brought out enough junk food “high-margin non-nutritive food products” to feed an army of teenagers low on self-esteem.

But for Juniors sake,  the Neos will try harder – there have to be more like-minded people in a city of 6 million (and it’s easy to meet them too, since all of them are currently on the same 2km stretch of road that Neo uses to commute home).

And finally, Neo Jr has to try harder too – when Neo’s elderly neighbor tried to distract Neo Jr from a bag of chocolates with “Hey look! there’s a rocket!”, Neo Jr gave the poor old lady his best bone-chilling, one-eyebrow-raised “are you frickin kidding me?” look!

But yes, Neo Jr has nothing on this kid:

(PS: Special bonus for those readers who thought they’ve finally seen the last of Neo’s tirades on religion: Did you know that Mrs. Neo prays every night ? Yes, every night after Neo Jr goes to bed, Mrs. Neo looks to the heavens and says “Thank God he’s in bed!”)