As a kid I was often given this very wise piece of advice…”never ever forget ur roots beta…” and believe me I have no intentions of doing so… but juss lemme figure out where exactly should my roots be… should it be the place where my great grandparents lived (Dhaka Bangladesh), or where my grandparents lived (Mumbai, Chennai, Madras as it was called then, and for a considerably long time Banaras or Varanasi, courtesy grandpa’s railways’ job), in case you are wondering, my maternal side of the family is equally colourful in terms of putting down their roots as we often keep hearing. Funny thing this concept of putting down roots gives me a visual image of my toes growing long slowly and digging deep into the earth beneath me and slowly immobilizing me. Moving on to the advice of not forgetting my roots, well this piece of advice got more and more redundant as the third question everyone in this country asks you is where are you from…and frankly I am at a loss whenever confronted on this front…with tym I have managed to give a well rehearsed answer though…I am a Bengali, born and brought up in Rohtak, Haryana, higher education in Chennai and Delhi, worked in Tamil Nadu, Faridabad, Mumbai and New Delhi…phew!
There is one thing though that I fail to understand…why am I ever asked that question… what does it tell? One thing that I have seen is that it snatches away whatever little sense of belonging I ever develop with any place. I visited Kolkata a lot as a child and a lil less frequently as I grew up… I was always an outsider there, a visitor…looked at as a foreign object...interesting but unimportant and temporary… back in Rohtak, my so called home town, the oft repeated comment is…”achha ji aap bangaali ho?” followed by a whole questionnaire of how come I landed here, no no no you can’t really call it home… you are after all an outsider… Delhi, Chennai, Ranipet, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Gandhinagar, Jaipur, Udaipur, Lucknow, Kanpur, Agra, Bangalore, Smaller towns of Haryana, Villages or towns of West Bengal…metropolitans and so called cosmopolitan cities... no matter what place what demographics…I have always been an outsider…why cant people from my own country with the most in common wid me accept me for being the person that I am and not ask me my full name for once in my life!!! And you know what is ironic?? We blame the Westerners for discriminating against us… they are doing to us what we do to each other…
can empathise with u!! but i can try and answer one question of yours - "Why do people ask from where are you?" -earlier this question had meaning since the cultural aspect of places were intact (not now) and what more people used to associate the person concerned with some known (or unknown may be) personalities who belonged to that place...
ReplyDeleteBut you have gone to the other extreme coconut .Tell atleast your fst name ,not family name .
ReplyDeletePeople have affiliates with area and caste ,and so are iniquisitive .You have raised basic questions ,which each one of us oftentimes encounter .Me too .Good post .
Someone came to visit us last night, a lady from our very own Bengali community. At the same time my older brother came with boudi and the my two little angels in tow. My nieces are 5 years apart, the older one is six and the younger one turned one in September last year. So this lady calls the older one near her and asks her "Tomar naam ki?" - "What's your name?" and she replied dutifully - Nandini...
DeleteThe lady still kept looking at her and looked dissatisfied and after a gap of 5 seconds said - "ki padavi ta to bolle na shona?" - "Darling you didn't tell me your surname?" to that my niece needed a little push and I prompted her, "What's you full name baby?" and she replied Nandini Mukherjee...
I didn't say anything then but it did remind me of this piece that i wrote sometime back!