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Journalism of Courage
Home nowadays has nothing to do with a piece of soil and everything to do with something I carry around inside me,8221; wrote Pico Iyer recently. He is perhaps the most able profiler of the Global Soul. Born in England of Indian parents, resident of America, with family in Japan, at home everywhere 8212; and nowhere 8212; he brings enormous personal experience and reflection to the task.
For the Global Soul, home is a state of mind, it is to be sited less by geographical coordinates and more by the intermingling of cultures 8212; in urban islands of cosmopolitanism, and in airports and shopping malls where fragments of everywhere else create a dystopic but familiar cocoon. It is, implies Iyer in his copious articles and books, a lonely pursuit, it is a highly individual quest.
For Rajiv, born in America, if that connection appears less fragile, his sense of identity is even more hazy. Nudged by loss out of his certainties, he seeks to construct belongingness with stories. In an disconcerting, if often clumsy, mix of memory, improvisation and fact, he takes his narrative back to his grandparents. But loneliness is not just the migrant8217;s condition 8212; they too have been displaced from secure ideas of home by time and circumstance.
Trouble is, Parekh tries to interweave too many stories and the tapestry keeps unraveling. There is first the mystery of his grandfather8217;s exact role during the freedom struggle; family legend credits him with blowing up bridges and adopting a new name to escape detection. There is the story of Rajiv8217;s parents, striving to update their status amidst newer waves of immigration. Most poignantly, there is Rajiv8217;s chance meeting with another Vasant at the airport, a young graduate just arrived to be enrolled in his father8217;s old college.
Parekh, a Boston-based doctor, does in the end spring some surprises. But through it all he suggests that belonging lies in the process of making and maintaining connections 8212; with the new country and the old 8212; that it cannot be a static end product. Ignore the rough edges, the odd threads that don8217;t tie up and few phrases that jar, and this is an impressive debut.
