Atanu Dey

I am a great fan of Dr. Dey's musings as he calls them. Below is an excerpt from his blog (reproduced with his permission).

I am an equal opportunity offender. I do not discriminate. If I see something rotten in the state of Denmark, I say it. When I see something rotten in my motherland (India, and there is a heck of a lot of rotten stuff here), I say it. It may offend patriotic Indians but that is an occupational hazard of being a patriot. So also, despite all my love for many things that the US is responsible for, when I note the horrors that US foreign policy inflicts on the weak, I am offended. I am offended not as an Indian or as an American (having lived for over 20 years in the US, I am well aware of how much American is in me), but as a human. Living in a place far away (in every sense of the term) from one's land of birth should cure anyone of the myopia common to most people which imprisons them within a parochial chauvinism. It is to that myopic viewpoint that I will address myself in this bit.

Why, some have asked me, do I always appear to criticize India and many things Indian? The reason is simple: I was born in India and I have very strong emotional attachments to the land of my ancestors. In some sense, you may even say that I love this place—however much I would like to say that this place is not very lovable. I care about what happens in here, I care about how the people of India live, I care about how India affects the world, I care about how India is perceived by others. I care about India in the same sense that I care about my friends and family. That immediately gives me the right to tell them where they screwed up and the responsibility to help them with their misfortunes. I will be fairly content to see a stranger screw up perhaps, but I will be damned if I will stand by and watch impassively my best friend behave like an idiot.

With maturity comes the realization that one is not just an Indian, or an Indian with a bit of American thrown in, but that one is a member of the extended human family. For convenience and tradition, that great family has been fragmented into so many warring groups. But in the end, we all are pretty much members of one big unhappy family. Some of us have more money, or are more educated, or have different pigmentation. But seen from a sufficiently far remove, we are fairly indistinguishable. We have the same hopes and aspirations, fears and longings, desires and dreams. Our station in life is dictated by a random draw that was made by forces beyond our imagination even, leave alone our control.

Each of us is like the turtle on top of a ten-foot pole: it did not get there by itself. Someone else put it up there. Can we really take any justifiable pride in being where we are? Do we inherit some merit because someone who lived in the same geographic area centuries ago did something great? What does it mean to say that a certain discovery was made by Einstein and therefore the average Jew feels somehow privileged for being a Jew? Or that the Buddha was born in the Indian subcontinent and gained enlightened in Bodh Gaya and therefore all present day residents of that land have reason to be proud of that fact?

As I see it, fundamentally, I neither inherit merit nor blame for what others who I claim kinship with have done or not done. But if one must, for whatever reason, inherit stuff, I think that one must expand one's kinship relationship to include the whole of humanity and become responsible for the entire bundle—the good and the bad. What I am objecting to is two-fold: first, the notion of defining one's kinship restrictively. Saying that I am an American and I will take pride in only American stuff. Second, selectively defining what one would like to inherit. I am an American and I am proud of all the great stuff that Americans have done. I reject that sort of parochial myopic hubris.

continue reading...