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South Asian Film Festival in Goa from Fri (June 27) to Mon (June 30)
At Kala Academy, and ESG, Panaji, Goa
http://lists.goanet.org/pipermail/goanet-goanet.org/2008-June/076384.html
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February 24th, 2003 was a day my husband and I celebrated being Indian. It
wasn’t earmarked on our calendar for any particular reason save for the fact
that we landed at Chicago bus station in the early morning of that day.
Chicago is one of the two states in the US that offers consular services for
Indians and we being in need of some paperwork, had decided to take the
Greyhound from Minnesota, through Wisconsin into Chicago. We ventured outside
the terminal into the blistering cold of a Chicago winter morning to find
ourselves amidst a sea of fellow bus-travelers who were all awaiting taxis to
ferry them onwards. The probability of us finding a taxi was slim and so we
braced ourselves for a long wait in the cold.
Chicago is a stark and forbidding city at the best of times, not particularly
renowned for its benevolence to strangers. While my husband and I awaited with
frozen fingers, toes and hearts, a taxi-cab whizzed past the crowds, swerved in
front of us and offered us a ride. We were slightly embarrassed as it is not
the done thing in America to bump the queue but we were desperate and jumped
into the cab without asking too many questions.
The young driver was Indian. His single question to us was if we were from
India, to which we replied in the affirmative. We don’t know which part of
India he hailed from, presumably up North, nor do we know what prompted this
young man into this act of kindness. Perhaps he felt sorry for bedraggled
looking Indians standing at the bus station. Perhaps somewhere inside him was a
desire to reach out and help fellow countrymen, however recessed the memory of
that country and his association with it may have been.
Beyond the religiocentric and ethnocentric identities of India, there is a
larger nation-centric identity that exists for us Indians and it manifests
itself most emphatically when we are outside of India. Infact our largesse
spreads even to Sri Lankans, Bangladeshis and Pakistanis, reveling in a certain
Indian sub-continental kinship. Why then do we turn inwards and fragment so
easily within the boundaries of India itself?
selma
