This is not Shilpa Shetty; This is Ravi Bhaskar, the guy who wrote this article, but I feel like Ms. Shetty in Big Brother - famous, controversial and stupid.
Phew, there has been a lot of bad blood spilt over this article. I apologise for not communicating well enough but make no mistake, I am not apologising for the meaning of the article, which I still think is positive.
I deeply appreciate and acknowledge all the feedback that I received today. Really I even took some of your personal assaults with a dose of good humor. But I regret the fact that this article triggered off a NRI vs Resident spat. I really dont know what this has to do with the message I tried to portray.
Honestly I have lived here for just over 2 years now and am still as Indian, if not more, than when I left India. And I am sure a lot of us living abroad feel that way.
An NRI has been stereotyped by misguided sects as someone who benefitted from India's higher education subsidies and then benefitted some other country. What seems to have pissed Resident Indians off is when jokes about how the NRIs came back strange accents, perfumed clothes, an aversion to our roadside foods and talked about how great their country is was taken without a sense of humor.
While some of this stereotyping might be true, I don't think the attack on NRIs is justified. Not all of us who leave the country don't contribute to India. While the Resident Indians judge the NRIs as being armchair critics, the NRIs can say the same about the Resident Indians - stop sitting in India and stereotyping all NRIs as detached people who dont contribute in anyway. How does simply staying back in India make RESIDENT INDIANS bigger contributors to India than NON RESIDENTS? Please be better informed before making judgements.
The common problem that most of you have had with the article is that I am an NRI, therefore your assumption that I am not doing what I preach, angers you.
Assumptions assumptions! Will you get the message of the article suddenly if the article didn't mention that I was out of the country? Or if I say that I am going to return to India in a couple of years, will that make the author more credible? But no, you will jump at my throat - "a couple of years, for what, to make money." Yes I want to make my money. I am not ashamed of it. Neither should you. No money, no superpower. And a country that has no money to feed its people will have little time to bother about being nice to each other.
What if I say that I want to make more money so I can open a free school for the poor; will that help you angered souls to make peace with me? Will that help you get the real message of my article and not wonder if I am an NRI or not.
What if I tell you that living abroad has taught me valuable lessons that I can use for the development of India when I return? Or is that a sin still for which I should be hanged?
Will my article be read for the right purpose, if I mention that I actively fought pollution, child labor and animal rights in my own way even before I ever left India?
Anyway, like most of you guys I have gone far besides the point. The point is that no matter where we live, we can still keep the wheel called India moving. In any which way we can. We(NRIs) like you(RIs) are not under any illusions about how difficult it is to transform the heart of a country. But all I am asking you to do, is to do your bit and the rest will follow. Wherever you are.
And let me leave this rejoinder with a small insight into macroeconomics. I know there are lots of NRIs who dont want anything to do with India. All I can say is they are free to do what they wish. It is a free world in which labor moves freely to where demand exists. But even if you are an ultra pessimist about an NRI please note that the retribution/money that NRIs send back year on year as a whole is more than what the IT industry contributes as % of GDP. Many of you may say, well the money goes to their family, how does that help the country? Good question - the money that the family spends in India is called Consumer spending which is the base of any economy. This is what drives Corporate Investment and Government Spending which are the other two legs of the tripod of an economy. So even the most indifferent NRI contributes.
This is unfortunate that I have to talk about NRIs and RIs....but I guess most of you were more interested in that topic than having a heart.
