Fuzzy identities

My son asked me this question when he was five. 8216;8216;Ma, if you are a Bengali and Papa is a Punjabi, what am I?8217;8217; We gave h...

My son asked me this question when he was five. 8216;8216;Ma, if you are a Bengali and Papa is a Punjabi, what am I?8217;8217; We gave him a simple answer, 8216;8216;Beta, you are an Indian8217;8217;.

So he went around telling his little friends that he is an Indian. No chest-thumping announcement of his patriotism 8212; I doubt if he knew the meaning of the word at the time 8212; but a clear and simple statement.

A few years later, came the other crucial question, 8216;8216;To which place do I belong? Where are my roots?8217;8217; We took some time over that one. I come from Meerut in Uttar Pradesh while my husband, who was born in Lahore, was brought up in Hyderabad. Now a Bengali from UP and a Punjabi from Hyderabad is a confusing combination. To add to it, we were forever on the move because my husband is in the Air Force. We took the easy way out, 8216;8216;You belong to the Air Force and your roots are in Meerut, Hyderabad, Lahore.8217;8217;

My son blinked. 8216;8216;Lahore as in Pakistan? But Pakistan is another country. How can my roots be there?8217;8217; How do you explain the Partition 8212; the carnage and the uprooting of millions 8212; to a ten-year-old? We didn8217;t even try.

Years later, in college, the columns of 8216;caste8217; and 8216;religion8217; had to be filled. 8216;8216;What is my caste?8217;8217; Since neither my husband nor I believe that the children should be told about the great social divide, we told them that they could fill in 8216;8216;Hindu8217;8217; in both the columns. In retrospect, may be we should have told them to fill in 8216;8216;Indian8217;8217; in both.

But our son soon got a taste of the regional divide that plagues our countrymen. He was doing his graduation in Secunderabad, Andhra Pradesh. Most of his classmates were Raos or Reddys who only spoke Telugu and made sure that anyone who did not know the language stayed out of everything.

After the primary consideration of language, came the finer distinctions of caste and community. The teenager who had been brought up on the fine principle of the oneness of the Indian people met his first disillusion. Of course, when he went on to do his MBA at Pune at an institute meant for defence personnel, he was back to his sunny disposition.

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I am not making out a case for services8217; children. But I truly believe that we, as a part of this plural nation, need to recognise and accept the different identities around us. We must look at the larger picture. Which is why the army has been bringing the kids from the Kashmir valley to the plains to see life for themselves. Which is why every state should make it a point to take school kids to another state to see how other Indians live.

Now we are hunting for a bride for our son. We religiously go through the classifieds on Sundays in all the national newspapers. I find that there are barely half a dozen that say 8216;caste and community no bar8217;! We shall search till we find a girl from a similar background. A 8216;khichdi8217; family like ours.