Frightfully English

Well that was a week that was – which is one of those profoundly constructed sentences that is designed to hide the banality of reality.  Which is that nothing much happened to me – well certainly not when compared to the catfish of the previous week. It was occupied with the tedium of existence and routine at once made up of going to work and not doing much work, exercising, dieting, worrying, planning, plotting, eating, Facebooking and BuzzFeeding.

Well tedium is not exactly true – I discovered aspects of my personality that BuzzFeed brought to my attention, that I, in my 29 years, was not perceptive enough to figure out.  There I was, at my desk, during one of those moments where my colleagues and I stop tapping the keyboards provided by the company we work for to divert our attention to the lifelines we carry with us in the form of a smartphone (I NEED to point out that we do this simultaneously, we either have worked with each other for so long that our brain clocks have synchronised, or we have company chips implanted on our person when we signed our employment contracts that means that “simultaneous downtime” can be more easily monitored……fuck knows).  Of course I am on Facebook:

Mia was tagged in Josef’s photos

Maya feeling hungry with Benjamin and 3 others – Sarah liked this

Vee – “I dreamt that I was eaten by a marshmallow, should I be freaked out coz I’m not?”

BuzzFeed Quiz shared a link – “How Cripplingly English are you?”

Hello?  I, an apparent BBCD (British-Born-Confused-Desi*) according to her Indian friends and Very Indian according to her English friends, has a chance to take advantage of BuzzFeed’s expertise on national identity to figure how much of one country she is over the other?!  Born in the UK, raised in India and in the UK, practising Hinduism, loving Mumbai, loving London, hating Indian politicians, hating British politicians – Hell yes, I need to – scratch that – I HAVE to do this quiz.  The extent to which I would screw up my future childrens’ national identity crisis depended on it ha ha ha ha isn’t this hilarious! I won’t bore you or myself with the questions themselves – suffice to say it involved tea and apologising – but the verdict was in:

You got: Frightfully English

Hm – I s- w-… hm.  Ok, this is – oh with a picture of the Dowager Countess just to really drive the point home…  2 feelings that overwhelmingly washed over me when I happened upon this verdict. Initially:

Pride – I belonged somewhere else too!  Let me explain.  Although born in the U.K., being the child of immigrant parents automatically renders the notion of nationality and identity moot.  It just does.  You immediately become – cheesy line alert – citizens of the world.  For in the maelstrom of what your parents teach you, what society teaches you and what education teaches you, what you should be, what you want to be and what you are and tricky things to figure out never mind compartmentalising yourself into one particular “culture”.

When I was young it was super easy – having spent a part of my childhood in India, I was of course Indian – doesn’t matter what my passport says I am – my brain, my heart, and my accent were Indian.  Then I moved back to the UK and struggled with an identity and cultural crisis – one that my mother went through as well.  My father was well accustomed to a life as an English man having moved to the UK as a bachelor to continue his education and never really looked back to the motherland – so to speak.  His solution for us – just let us be, we will figure it out.

The years rolled on, I had adopted the crucial ability of being able to change between an English and and Indian accent and found myself understanding what this “Britishness’ was all about.  As I headed into my 20s I found myself – shock horror – identifying with this Britishness.  The “stiff upper lip” for example, which in my mind has only ever been related to one thing – getting the fuck on with it – I am right behind this!  Even more so every time I find myself spitting out my tea when I read about a case on trial in India and find out that its for a crime that was committed several decades prior – not because there was new evidence that came to light but because that is just how long it takes for a case to just get to court in the first place.

So I go about living my life in London just like any other person yet inexplicably carry this need to want to be identified – which is ironic given how cosmopolitan London actually is, but I guess the thought of blending away scares me a little. Back to the quiz – laughing to myself about my new found self-discovery (Haha! That’s so funny, everyone will think that is hilarious because its not true ha ha hee hee), I mention to a colleague of mine that apparently I am Frightfully English according to BuzzFeed…

“You are Frightfully English”

“Are you just repeating what I am saying, questioning what I am saying or agreeing with it?”

“Agreeing, you are Frightfully English”

…

…

Guilt – Hm – I s- w-… hm.  Ok, this is hm…I don’t like this anymore…But I am Indian too right?  Its a tricky one – given a small yet contentious period of history between the two nations, it is an irony that does not escape me, but the past is in the past.  If we are held liable for the actions of our ancestors we as a species will cease to carry on.

I must be Indian (I too run on Indian Standard Time and am inexplicably late for everything – my friends love me for who I am including my hit-and-miss timing so its all good) and am very aware that I am the descendant of a long line of ancestors (barring my parents) that had never left the sub-continent.  I am a Hindu and eagerly look forward to when I can next go back to my other home that is the pollution-infested city of hope, optimism and grit that is Bombay.  I am a Bharatanatyam dancer (look it up, I can’t be arsed to explain), and learnt the art form from India for the best part of 22 years.  I watch Comedy Nights with Kapil, and the odd Indian film (I refuse to say the B-word) so long as it carries a good, non-cheesy storyline.  When in India I wear Indian clothes without making a conscious effort to do so, shout “Bhaiya” at people to get my work done, stuff my face at High Point in Lokhandwala and cry every time the country goes through a terrorist attack and I am not there to help in any tiny minuscule way that I can.

I am Indian.

It’s a small internal battle I have every time this issue crops up and I think I have reached an answer – I compartmentalise the Indian and the British in me with each side popping where required, and so far each side has managed to behave itself (save the occasional accent mix up, but the person I am talking to at the time has always had the good grace to think my brain must have temporarily short-circuited and has casually side-stepped it).  I realise though that what I am referring to are traits, the actions that we use on a daily basis, actions influenced by the surroundings in which we grow up – nurture.  At the core of it all, its not all that different – live and let live.  Yes both countries have a remarkable ability at not letting live – a simple glance at the rise in fringe political parties in the U.K., and the further demarcation amongst already small communities in India is evidence of this.  But if we just say what we are thinking which is that these people are all nutters, then the concept is the same.  I guess my father was right, I eventually did figure it out.

So this Frightfully English, Incredibly Indian woman temporarily recovered from her identity crisis and moved on….

That will probably last until she comes across another BuzzFeed quiz at which point she will no doubt spill her guts here about the meaning of life, whether she actually exists and  – God help those that are reading this 😉

S.