Leaving India

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That's all, folks. If all goes as planned, I leave India in about 7 hours and should be "home" in Canada in about 24.

I'll do a wrap from there -- call me paranoid but I don't want to do it here and now.

Cheers y'all!

A

East and West

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If you’re a reader of postcolonial fiction you’d probably assume that the flow of peoples these days goes in only one direction: from East to West. Literary fiction is full of the tales of those who dream of going from India, or Kenya, or another exotic sounding but poverty stricken margin to England or America and more rarely, to Canada or Australia. For two generations now, there’s been a much written about exodus from India of the educated classes, epitomized perhaps by Jhumpa Lahiri’s moving short story “Third and Final Continent.” (If you haven't read it yet, read it there at the New Yorker: it's last paragraph is perhaps the finest epigraph written for for the experience of immigration!) Smarting under what they experienced of the lazy socialism of India in the 3^rd quarter of the 20^th century, too many of the educated classes – primarily doctors, engineers, nurses, and later on, computer types and suchlike professionals – departed the shores of the young nation. I should know: my family falls right into this category.

But things are slowly starting to change: where once the culmination of most young university students’ dreams was to leave for greener pastures, now it seems as though most young graduates dream of landing a job in India in an MNC (multinational corporation). The opening up of the Indian economy to foreign direct investment and the easing of regulations on joint enterprises has meant that there are now literally thousands of companies in India which are affiliated – in some way – with organizations in other parts of the world. One consequence of this is that people now move both ways – from and into India. Leaving India for education or employment is no longer seen as a permanent decision; more importantly, there is a heady feeling in the air – perhaps still more potentially than realistically – that the world will have to start coming to India rather than expecting India(ns) to come to it.

It’s with this sentiment in mind that GMR (one of these aforementioned MNCs that is poised to reap benefits from the latent arrival of modernity in India – for instance, they have a large share in Hyderabad’s new international airport) has launched an aggressive new advertising campaign. The “Getting Ready for India/Getting India Ready” campaign features a number of spots all focussing on various people preparing to arrive in India. One, launched in the middle of the ongoing India-Australia cricket series, begin with the voiceover announcing “Getting Ready for India” as a Chinese family is learning to play cricket: as the mother grips a cricket bat, the father watches a cricket game in slo-mo and instructs his son on how to bowl. The voiceover returns to announce “GMR: Getting India Ready.” My peeps here tell me it’s a hit. Another ad features a roomful of Europeans learning to dance Bollywood style. A third shows a family weeping as they sit at a laden dining table and eat chillies. And there’s one that has two Turkish men sitting, fully clad in business suits, in a sauna and practising the names of the Indian cities they are heading to. There is a last GMR ad that’s also currently playing that isn’t obviously part of this series but which captures this sentiment even more precisely: it features an Indian mother and father (respectively praying and pacing) as they wait for their son to return from a visa interview at a US embassy. He erupts into the room, celebrating, and they stare befuddled, as he chants that his visa was denied.

I’m taken with the “Getting India Ready” ads, partly because I find them amusing and partly because I’m impressed by the truly global nature of the people they depict as getting ready for India: Chinese families, Turkish men, Germans and Spaniards are all shown as preparing to arrive in India. That old binary of the West having to mean North American/Western Europe is slowly being erodod. And that last ad – the visa rejection one – is perhaps the most interesting example of the generationality (is there such a word?) of the Westward movement. That these are ads, designed not so much to make points about national trajectories as to capture an already existent feeling makes them even more powerful: it suggests that for some at least, this satisfaction with India already exists. And that – from where I sit – can only be a good thing.