Nerve Endings Firing Away

A surprise package never fails to surprise me or make me a wee bit happy. Supposedly my birthday gift, two books and a pile of greeting cards arrived yesterday in our business office. Damn! I so hate these UPS buggers who paste a minimalist notice on your front door in spite of people present in the house. I sometimes think they do it on purpose as if to make you literally beg for your parcel. Walk up to your door stealthily, knock softly like the proverbial opportunity and quick dash to their brown van. Poor me has to drive all the way to the business office located a good mile away in the other complex to pick up a teensy weensy parcel. I do this every time my roomies get some package from some random forefathers, five brothers, six sisters, or seven uncles. Not that I mind it because they are gracious enough to share the contents if they can be shared.

Anyways, digression apart I am always surprised when I get something larger than a junk envelope announcing 0% APR. After heaping praises of India Unbound and The Elephant Paradigm, my dad is inundating me with books on India. Or maybe there is something more sinister to his gifts. He always has tried to build my character with every gesture but I am not sure if he has met with any success. So his gifts border on being extremely utilitarian and my mom’s paradoxically walks the other side by inscribing yucky nicknames on paper greetings. Thankfully this year, she sent some blank ones instead and proudly told me that the children in her kindergarten had painted the covers. They were kinda cute and I will send some out to people I know out here.

But again getting back to Dad’s gifts, as I mentioned earlier there is always something fishy in his choice of gifts. His previous email was as usual, advisory in nature exhorting me to concentrate on my studies and trying to convince me that he understood if I wanted to live on in the US to earn a couple of crores before I came back to India. Wait a second; I think I must have read it wrong. Couple of crores??? Dad mustn’t know that the path that I have chosen doesn’t really pay that well. After all I am no software geek coding late into the night and drawing an astronomical salary. If moderately successful, I might just turn out to be a researcher who draws more satisfaction from his work than money. That may simply be his paternal instincts at trying to see his son settled financially in life. But I guess that is the impression of most of the people in good ol’ India that if your son/daughter is in the yonder land, he/she must be rolling in money.

So then does he want me to return to India? I don’t think so, although I still have that option open. An IIT-alumnus himself, he missed his boat to the New World and merely watched his classmates fly away, making it big eventually. His only reason for staying back was that his father refused him the money for the airline ticket. I have seen his I-20s and scholarship letters gathering dust in our family archives. It still disturbs him. He does not necessarily have a great impression of Indian politics or the bureaucracy having seen the corrupt scum first-hand. Usually our discussions are quite the reverse, me being optimistic about India’s future and Dad trying to point at ground realities. But I have seen the gradual shift in his views, given the flourishing Indian economy and the floundering American economy. Maybe destiny was kind in bringing prosperity to his land when he had expected that it had left its shores forever. Maybe he does want me in India but not for the bags of money but rather to partake in the sense of optimism that he has lately discovered. I hope he is right.