Friendly Neighborhood Indian

I am fervently Bengali and wholeheartedly Indian. I grew up in Durgapur, in the industrial heartlands of West Bengal. In school I guess I had as many non-Bengali friends as Bengalis. My scores in Bengali were always on the lower side (Just for the record my lowest score in ICSE was in Bengali) and people have made fun of it. I am apparently not Bengali enough because of my ways and how I talk, dress, interact with people and my chaste Hindi. My Hindi apparently being pretty good for people from my part of the country. It does not have a Bengali accent according to some people who have mistaken me for someone from Bihar or UP. But I am not "thet" enough to be identified as someone from the Northern States or Bihar. I have always reveled in this. The uniqueness of India and that you can be from one place and be so different from someone else in your own country and yet the same, yet very Indian. I have also been a butt of a few "bloody NRI" jokes some of which might not have been jokes actually.

But now my friends here tell me that I do not have an "Indian accent". I have heard enough "slurpee" jokes to know what that sounds like, though I have only heard very few people in India talk like that. And I do not know whether to like it or not. I am proud of my Indianness, does it mean now I am a little less Indian now? I swear by the tricolor in my room I am not. I guess I will have to compensate otherwise to make myself more Indian. I wonder what I can do? But until I discover my true being in this incredible quagmire of identities I remain what my friend Arun Krishnamoorthy calls "your friendly neighborhood Indian".



[P.S. an NRI for the uninitiated is a Non Resident Indian or in more clearer terms according to "someone" a bloody backstabber who deserts his own country for greener pastures and a few thousand extra dollars.
"thet" Hindi is another word for chaste Hindi but the connotation is a little more complex and less serious but the complexity is lost in translation.
And Arun I had been writing this for a while but thanks for the ending.]