The Immigrant

I've seen a lot of immigrants (or would be immigrants) who retain their own culture and show it off proudly when in a foreign country. Many more, like European Moslems or Asian or Hispanic Americans demand that the local population be more broad minded, tolerant and accepting of their foreign culture, which they will blatantly demonstrate, rather than changing themselves. If the locals do not co-operate, then they are called xenophobic.

I live in India which is a terrible mix of language, ethnicities and religions. Since my childhood I have lived among people who speak a certain language. Now, and especially since 1995, since entrepreneurship, capitalism, communication and corruption have all got a massive boost in India, neighboring ethnic groups have made such inroads into my hometown that the culture which I was brought up with is next to being inundated. Things have reached such an extent that my native language and culture is now ridiculed and is considered lower class in the region that I once used to call home. On the other hand, native speakers have become such an insignificant economic and numeric minority that they lose out in democracy because few if any who can vote for them, speak their language. It doesn't help that most people who speak my native tongue, (themselves an extremely heterogenous and fragmented mix of ethnicities who happen to speak the same language) seem to have become short-sighted (perhaps always were) and fail to see a bigger Kashmir or Palestine-like pattern slowly emerging before their eyes. But as a local I am expected to absorb all of that change and not react to the immigration that has resulted in a complete change in the living patterns that I have been accustomed to since my childhood. If I so much as open my mouth, I am not sure whether I will be called a fundamentalist or worse.

Its the same in the United States. Americans have a set way of life. Foreigners like us come into their country. They have the right of way, not us. If anything, we need to be more accommodating to the local culture than expect them to understand "our culture", which is the worst thing you can say in a foreign country. They have built, generation upon generation a culture that is free from vanity, divested themselves of their immigrant ethnicities, and homogenized themselves through inter-marriage. When the ancestors of modern Americans have came into America barely a few hundred years ago, many of them cast their cultural baggage into the Atlantic. They came to this nation, not with the ghost of a 5 thousand or a 1300 year past, but with a 50 year future ahead of them.

But we Indians don't seem to appreciate that. Even Indians living here for a longer term are still, and will always be, hyphenated Indian-Americans. And as far as temporary Indian workers like us go, often brilliant with mediocre intelligences and negligible creativities, the love for our native cultures is immense. And what is worse, after living in the United States of America or Canada or the United Kingdom for long, we cease to be Indians, and become Punjabis or Gujaratis or South Indians or Bengalis or Marathis. This is not my limited observation speaking, this is an acknowledged fact that an immigration study sponsored by the University of Michigan found.

That Americans do not behave with us like a barbaric Arab or Afghan/Pak NWFP group would behave with a Hindu Indian family if they are one day found wandering in an area under their control is testimony to their civilized, well-mannered and tolerant ways. Indians in the Middle East have no intellectual freedom. That is not the case with Indians living in the United States. I'm sure there are some paranoid Americans who "hate all things foreign" and some of them can become barbaric and savage too, in a land where gun manufacturers rule. In such cases, it is up to the immigrant to decide the pros and cons of staying in that place. For instance, there are still some neo-Nazi Americans who live in remote farm areas, maybe in the Dakotas or Kansas or maybe Georgia, who have built a parallel universe around them. I wouldn't wish to live in those parts. Nor in states like, for example, Alabama or Mississippi, with their history of the Klan (funny it should be spelt German-style) !

But these remote examples apart, America is a welcoming nation. It is the immigrant whose responsibility it is to adapt to the ways of the local population and not expect that the local population adapt itself to your ways. Of course, thanks to the often bashful behavior of many immigrants in my own home ground, I have learned this in contrast - always respect the culture you go to, and when in a foreign place, try to appreciate the local culture, learn as much as you can, and become a part of it, instead of trying to teach them to appreciate your culture. If you want them to come over to your culture, invite them over to your home, will you? Otherwise what would we be? Non-violent versions of those savages of history - the Ghaznavids, the Mongols or the Moors?

And that is the policy I have kept to when in America. Cheers to the Angus!

Bird Flu

The media have one strategy. If no one's listening, yank up the number of deaths. If nobody cares that 10 people died, how about making it 10,000 people died? That'll catch their attention. Still no response? Okay how about 10 million people died! Now that's good news reporting. Look how everybody's begun talking about it suddenly !

What exactly is achieved by an idiot of a journalist or a greedy struggling editor who decides to spawn more false stories like the so-called Bird Flu pandemic "waiting to happen". Can the clowns who live off the media do anything about anything at all, apart from print or show stuff that scares more people and blackmails them to read or view their products?

Besides what do you care anyway? America and Western Europe (the media wishes) would be spared by bird flu, which (again the media wishes) would finish off their Asian competition.

Well, neither of that's going to happen. The 1918 so-called pandemic was not even mentioned till the bird flu cases started appearing. Nobody knows exactly whether the Spanish flu killed a 100 thousand or a million, which itself is a tragic number let alone "50 to 100 million people" (wonder where people get their figures from).

1917-18 was the end of WWI. There was little reporting machinery in those times. Europe was a wasteland. Asia was lain waste by broken down colonial rule. There was no WHO or no independent agencies. Medical science and diagnostics were a fraction of what they are today. More people died from the poverty, famine and diseases brought on by the end of world war I than by the so-called flu, forgotten for a century, and revived by the wasted media, desperate for stories in an overheated age of competition where everybody has a "dream". Perhaps the media would like to print which country lost how many citizens instead of jacking up their invented claims of 50 to 100 million deaths.

Laughable!