Chai Chalk Chatter

My initiation to Dr. Tharoor’s literary work was with ‘Pax Indica’ and while I have come quite a long way from those days, I still enjoy what he writes. It was his ‘Why I am a Hindu’ that shaped my critique of an essential part of my identity which I guess was again negated with Kancha Ilaiah’s ‘Why I am not a Hindu’ but I guess this is a tussle which every thinking human will always have in their life. Coming to the most recent addition to Dr. Tharoor’s endeavor to provide direction to the idea of India, I think ‘The Battle of Belonging’ is a worthwhile contribution. It’s not that I agree to all he has written but we exist in a state of evolving discourse and as such not making any contribution to that discourse would be more demeaning than producing something which is evidently intended to keep up the spirit of an old diminishing elite. There are certain arguments in the book though, that cannot be denied – the most important one being the transformation to the idea of India. I b...

Sitting by the seashore on a Sunday evening and admiring some photographs stuck to the walls led me to think of an encounter with this amazing American lady who had been staying in India for the past 7 years. In conversation, she revealed that she owned a boutique and a roof-top food joint, in the beach town of Pondicherry. It was she who introduced me to the concept of Cultural Sensitivity. When I went all out complaining about the existing moral policing in Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry (obviously being from North-East India, moral policing with reference to clothing is the first thing that a first-time traveler would notice, while traveling to so-called mainland India) and as to how ethnocentric they were. She told me only one thing, “Hey boy! You have come to their place and not them.” At that time I didn’t quite understand the gravity of those words. With time, though, it all became clear, the idea of ethnocentrism is actually both ways; the fact that I perceived the loc...