An attack on global India

India has evolved since, in ways dramatically different to Malaysia. Very few Malaysians now come to India to study. They know that their country, has, in many ways, joined the first world.

It is Indians who now head for Malaysia as illegal cooks, taxi drivers and spare labour. The latest lot have come in as cheap but legal infotech workers, helping wire up a country barreling down the infobahn.

It was 180 of these techies8212;mostly all Telugus8212;who were roused from their Sunday slumber by Malaysian police and whisked away to detention. They were slapped, kicked, their visas defaced and humiliated in other ways before Indian government intervention finally set them free.

As I write this, the anger in South Block is fierce: How could puny Malaysia do this to us? We have a self-image: brainy and confident, in a muscular, thermonuclear way. In newly prosperous countries like Malaysia, it is a confidence that is resented, even derided.

When I sent an e-mail to another old Malaysian friend-an ethnic Malay whom I met during a workshop in Kuala Lumpur8212;the response was strong. 8220;You see, you think you are a superpower,8221; he said. 8220;But in South-East Asia, we know what India is like today, we see the pictures. You may have the bomb, you may export techies, but what else? Your poverty is very bad, religious fighting is every day. And cows still roam the streets.8221;

Jeering resentment here. So what does all this have to do with the indignities heaped on those poor Telugu boys? It is a complex issue, partly connected with our self-declared yeh dil mange more achievements8212;consisting primarily of cricket we hope, the bomb and infotech-partly with the expat Indian8217;s inability to assimilate culturally in foreign societies.

It begins with a remarkable ability to block out the world. The chatteratti today revels in the first-world qualities of its life: that car with power steering and CD changer, that quaint deli down the road, the choice of movies at the multiplex.

There8217;s no need to go to Singapore or America, they will say triumphantly. That8217;s true. There lives are pretty much the same as their compatriots abroad. Only, they must ignore the grim, grimy world outside their cars and delis.

Expat Indians, in slightly differing fashion, are imbued with this same quality. When they are in alien surroundings, the first instinct is to retreat, not reach out.

Alarmingly, this is so even with the new tech migrant. Sure, there are some global Indians, cerebral, prosperous world citizens, but they are the ones in Forbes and the Financial Times. The vast majority of tech workers is not substantively different from the indentured labour of the first great Indian migrations.

There is nothing wrong with building temples and Udipi restaurants in Silicon Valley, mosques and curry houses in Bradford. Indeed, migrant communities everywhere have similar zones of comfort. But Indian communities are distinct.

Whatever their year and mode of emigration, they are inexorably bound to their origins. They will wear tricolour T-shirts and Gandhi topis and travel to South Africa from England to cheer for India, never mind if Surrey is more home than Surat.

They hang on to their Indianess for generations. Their ultimate defining quality: the desire to find a mate from home. In Fiji, 120 years after leaving India, intermarriages with native Fijians are rare, as rare as Indian-Malay marriages in Malaysia.

Oh, about my friends Philip and Ravi, those cosmopolitan, proud Malaysians. Philip married a Bangalore girl. Ravi, a former Malaysian senator8217;s son, lived in America for a decade, lived the American dream and surfaced in Punjab blast year. He was looking for a bride.