A Srinivas Rao
I was surprised when someone I know was wishing others the national day of his adopted country, a state which is also unfairly sometimes called a ‘nanny state’. It was not the incongruity but the intriguing idea of solidarity and loyalties (however divided) to the lands of our adoption. The lands in question are not merely those of geography but mental worlds. “We Are All Palestinians” was the emblazoned lettering on the Tee shirt that one day flashed across the street, provoking me to wonder whether that was true. Palestine to the author of this shirt sleeve slogan was more than a nation without a state. Palestine is a ‘state’ of exile. Maybe we are all Diaspora, exiled in varied ways from what we imagine as ‘home’. In other words, is ‘home’ an imagining of a golden childhood, inaccessible except through longing, a nostalgic hankering for the “holy grail”? Just like the saccharine refrain of Dwijendralal Roy’s song “Amar Janmobhoomi” a mere fictitious idyll. Are our loyalties really divided between our native lands and the places of our adoption (and our freshly minted citizenships markers to a yearned difference in our self identities and descriptions and demonstrated by declamations of loyalties)?
