Saakhi: Amreeka, America, the US
America entered our home sometime in the late 50s, when father came back after a long trip to Canada and the USA. From New York, his last port of call, he had picked up two little bronze souvenirs. One was a lady in a flowing gown and a crown upon her head, holding aloft a flaming torch. We were told she was called The Statue of Liberty. The other item was a tiny replica of The Empire State building, New York’s pride and one of the world’s tallest buildings.
For long, our house was filled with our small town relatives and nosey neighbours, eager to know more about the far off country they had known only through films and journals. All that made us feel we were all celebrities. “You know,’ Dhiru Bhaiya, our neighbour’s son and the oldest among our playmates, said to us, “Amreeka is a land paved with gold. And Amreekans are so rich that even the beggars there go around in cars to beg”.
Even though we had no house of our own in India, born in transferable government servants’ families, we always landed in a comfortable house waiting for us no matter where the latest posting catapulted us. But years later, when our little family – my husband, two-year-old daughter and myself – arrived in Washington DC on fourth of July, we heard the fireworks and cheering crowds nearby but felt lost and homeless in a hotel waiting to be located in an apartment that the HR department found for us.
Everything felt different – the people, faces, clothes. Even familiar food like milk and bread tasted different. For days, my daughter looked under beds and in chests of drawers to find familiar faces that might be playing hide-and-seek with her. The eyes I met in the hallway were cautious and incurious, and were soon averted. It was 1970 and young Indians in motels or the youth hostels were acceptable but in posh hotels they were not a familiar sight. People often asked me kindly if I had wandered in by mistake and needed to be guided to my destination. When I said I was staying at the hotel, I got long looks and no more was said.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
The thing I now remember from the four years we subsequently spent in DC, were the supercharged conversations we had with our young group of mostly Indian friends, economists working with the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The subject was mostly our Indian ‘identity’ in a capitalist country not too keen on socialism. Many of our friends who had come in as students from campuses known from deep Communist leanings, had decided to stay on and self avowedly kept a sardonic, analytical distance from the American culture of chasing money.
They were dismissive of the hippies that were roaming the campuses from the Georgetown University to MIT, totally disinterested in what their nation demanded of them in Vietnam as patriotic citizens. Our Indian friends with varied ideologies spoke impeccable English, only occasionally cracking jokes in their mother tongues or expressing a hankering for hot home cooked Indian meals. But that was all. Most were smug and content, especially the wives freed from large Indian families they had married into with their eternal squabbles and embedded misogyny.
Ironically this was when Ravi Shankar and Mahesh Yogi and transcendental meditation were all the rage among America’s home grown flower children. The unasked question was how could they be rejecting precisely what was so compelling to so many all through the world ? By and large most new migrants wanted to settle in an America they had seen in films, advertisements and books, even though most of the intelligent ones knew that even back then, they were not exactly welcome.
The post Vietnam war years that followed our return to India shattered a certain naïve and cosy view of the USA in Asia. Simultaneously, many of the erstwhile Flower Children joined the mainstream workforce again and became successful Baby Boomers of the 80s and 90s. In India, gradually we began noticing certain embarrassing habits of US representatives who were posted in India which back then was far closer to the USSR. The expat Americans’ speech and lifestyles displayed a mix of Methodist style preachy do-goodism and ruthless self interest. Those who were soft on them found this bluntness and work ethic attractive.
The idea of America as a refuge against tyranny, a land that gave a chance to all willing to work hard, to start afresh and offered to defend essential human freedoms all over the world, would have remained a warm fuzzy feeling within us, but for our exposure over the years to the fallout of the military interventions in Bangladesh, Iraq, Libya, Venezuela. Today many coups and international upheavals later, this has not changed that much, even though India has risen rapidly out of poverty and the USSR has disintegrated.
Despite the rise of China and Russia, the phantom of American culture still stalks the entire Asian subcontinent. Only thing new is that it often wears Indian CEOs’ masks. That should not fool us about the fact that it remains a country under a clearly white supremacist government that does not hesitate to dismiss our leadership at a whim. During many decades as a journalist one has witnessed many unimaginable national and international pairings and break ups, mass migrations of the poor, their humiliating deportation, visited the refugee camps and smelt the animal smell of fear and unbathed bodies.
But I also realise that notwithstanding Amreeka’s many astoundingly unwanted interventions and pronouncements, anti Americanism as a fig leaf for our own incompetencies and economic blunders was and is grossly wrong. It is also rather naïve to think that old style racism and colonial attitudes in Europe evaporated with globalisation. In Davos, mourning the collapse of an eternal ‘rules- based international order’ one realised all over again how Europe may really belong to exactly the same world as Amreeka. And how they are all currently preoccupied not with tackling global warming or poverty but bear within them deep contradictions over their own liberal immigration policies, relocation of excludable aliens, supply chains of the first decade of the new century.
The neo nationalism visible in Davos seemed mostly the warmed over old nationalism. It still believes that the ‘rules-based’ order can be selectively reviewed to protect NATO allies’ land and economic interests. In contrast, often when non EU members face threats and military interventions, the rules can be rewritten, accountability vetoed and legal standards waived in the name of restoring world order. So it is right that the Eastern bloc, not the least we Indians, should support Canada’s stance on resisting the big bully. But we must also keep in mind that we need to stand firm of our own ground. France may now firmly be rejecting American bossiness, yet it was France that sculpted and donated the Statue of Liberty to the USA, and later its own socialist government invited and financed the creation of Euro Disney. .
At the moment, in the microcosm of Davos, the world looks like a nasty place seething with a universal desire among power blocs to unite to corner the earth’s rare minerals while denying shelter to millions migrating towards more habitable sites on the planet. A proclaimed desire to check carbon emissions but wage wars and engineer coups for natural oil and gas. Still truth be told, the world admires the Canadian prime minister’s speech at WEF that clearly stated what needed to be said against an almost unstoppable barrage of bullying. Hopefully it should embarrass most Americans who do not support this trend.
The world, notwithstanding its current reputation, loves the America represented by friends and America’s cultural icons, music, media, fiction and non fiction. All of us who treasure freedom admire its lively cities and thriving multi racial population. As a people Americans remain smart and funny, open, warm and imaginative and stll captivate minds. But we must also bear in mind the wise words of Thucydides about the natural logic of international relations and how it will always need to reassert itself time and again, to prevent chaos.
Mrinal Pande is a writer and veteran journalist.
Saakhi is a Sunday column from Mrinal Pande, in which she writes of what she sees and also participates in. That has been her burden to bear ever since she embarked on a life as a journalist, writer, editor, author and as chairperson of Prasar Bharti. Her journey of being a witness-participant continues.
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