Toothpaste India
A former associate editor with the Times of India, Jug Suraiya writes two regular columns for the print edition, Jugular Vein, which appears every Friday, and Second Opinion, which appears on Wednesdays. His blog takes a contrarian view of topical and timeless issues, political, social, economic and speculative. LESS ... MORE
Wherever in the world we go, it feels like home only
On a street in Turin, a young man walked past me talking on his cell phone, and I suddenly felt a sense of spatial displacement, of not knowing where I was. Because the young man was speaking in Punjabi, making me think for a moment that I was back in India instead of in Italy.
It happens to us all the time. Wherever we Indians travel, we come across other Indians who are residents of the place we're visiting.
I've never had the opportunity of travelling to Tierra del Fuego, the archipelago at South America's southernmost tip which is shared by Chile and Argentina and translates as 'the end of the world', but were I ever to do so, I wouldn't be at all surprised to be greeted with a 'Namaste, Bhaisaab' by a domiciled Tierra del Fuegan.
There are some 35.4mn people of Indian origin, PIOs, scattered across the globe. Which is 8.7mn more than the residents of the Australian continent, and is the biggest migratory population in the world.
There are many reasons for this mass migration, economic compulsions and seeking greener pastures abroad being the most common and the most obvious.
An ancillary factor might be what could be called the toothpaste tube effect: when the tube is squeezed, the toothpaste gets extruded from it. With its population of 1.438bn having overtaken that of China, making it the most populous country on the planet, India is like a squeezed tube of toothpaste.
We think of India as a big country and it is. It's five times larger than France and nine times larger than Germany, but US is three times the size of India with a population merely a quarter that of India's.
Canada is also about three times the size of India and has a population of only 40mn, just seven million less than that of the city of Delhi. Russia is four times bigger than India and its population is one-tenth of India's.
Squeezed out India might well represent an international toothpaste brand called Akhand Bharat.
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