Same chaos, different time zone
When I left India in 1989, I was fleeing a very specific kind of chaos. I was escaping the bureaucracy where a simple signature required three bribes, ten passport photos, and a blood sample. I was leaving a culture where time was a philosophical concept rather than a practical construct.
I arrived in America expecting the Promised Land. Lo and behold, it was. For a while.
I remember walking into a grocery store in Columbus, Ohio and weeping softly in the cereal aisle. There were forty kinds of flakes. The floor was so clean I could have eaten off it, and the girl at the check out counter told me to “Have a nice day” with such aggressive friendliness I assumed she was flirting with me. She wasn’t. She was just being American.
In those days, America felt different from the India of my youth. In India, everything was a struggle. Here, everything was automatic. You booked a car, it was there. You bought a plane ticket, you got a seat. I felt I had arrived in a country where competence was the baseline, not the exception. Eventually, I parked my anxieties next to my oversized sedan and settled into the quiet, predictable rhythm of a suburbia in the First World.
Sadly, America has changed, not always for the worse. It seems that while I was busy assimilating, making a living and raising a family, America was busy becoming the India of my childhod.
It started slowly. It wasn’t the roads that cracked first. It was the competence. I used to marvel that in America, things “just worked.* Now, American customer service has evolved into a sophisticated form of gaslighting. Flying has become less like travel and more like a cattle drive run by people who hate cows. Hotels treat clean towels like a negotiable perk. Politicians have gone from carefully hiding their deficiencies to openly flaunting them. The cancer of corruption has taken hold in public service.
I left India hoping it would eventually cure itself of its legendary ineptitude. I never imagined that instead, America would catch the virus. We are becoming incompetent in a way that feels chillingly familiar. The “Can-Do” spirit that once exemplified America has been replaced by the “The System is Down” shrug. It is a cruel irony. I moved halfway across the world to escape dysfunction, only to watch my adopted home eagerly import it.
But the most jarring transformation is the national mood. I grew up in a place where people argued passionately, loudly, and endlessly. They still do. I moved here for the “civil discourse,” key word being civil. Now, I watch the news and realize that America has adopted the Bollywood model of conflict resolution: high drama, zero logic, and everyone dancing to a different tune.
The polarization here is truly staggering. In India, we have thousands of years of complex social history to justify our divisions. America has managed to achieve the same level of tribalism in the time it took to introduce the iPhone. Neighbors who once borrowed sugar from each other now stare across the lawn like rival warlords because of a yard sign. The famous American “melting pot” feels less like a fondue and more like a pressure cooker where the safety valve has been welded shut.
To add to the existential dread, I now have to contend with the WhatsApp forwards from the motherland. Friends who stayed behind seem to view America’s stumbling as a spectator sport. They send me breathless video clips about the “End of Western Hegemony” with a tone that I can only describe as giddy.
It feels personal. When I left thirty years ago, I didn’t send back postcards celebrating their inflation rates. I wanted them to do well. Yet, they seem strangely vindicated by my new reality, as if my discomfort proves that staying put was the superior strategic choice. It is a peculiar betrayal – to realize that the people you grew up with are quietly rooting for the roof to cave in on your head, mostly so they can say the architecture was always unstable. I am tempted to retort with something clever that makes me feel better. I refrain. It doesn’t make me feel better to do that anymore.
So, I look toward the future with a complicated cocktail of optimism and heartburn. The heartburn might just be the age, but I suspect it is the existential dread of realizing there is nowhere left to run. If America falters, where do I go? There is no “Super America” waiting in the wings. Mars is not an option, in spite of Elon’s best efforts to market it. I hear the commute is terrible and the Wi-Fi is nonexistent. I am, quite literally, at the end of the line.
Perhaps this convergence between my two homes is not a tragedy. Perhaps it is a strange and new kind of kinship, one that no one wanted in the first place. And yet here we are. To my friends in India, I say: put down the popcorn and offer a hand. We are beginning to look a lot like each other, and we could use the tips on how to manage the chaos without losing our minds.
And to us here in America: maybe the efficiency I missed was never the soul of this country, just the packaging. Now the packaging is torn. It is messy, and things don’t work the way they used to. But we are still here. We are all – from Chennai to Chicago – stuck in the same messy, imperfect struggle to live together without tearing each other apart.
Perhaps that is the ultimate hope. Democracy isn’t a vending machine where you insert a vote and get a perfect society. It’s a potluck dinner where half the people bring wine and the other half bring grievances. It is annoying, yes. But as long as we are all still at the table, arguing over the menu, we haven’t given up.
I guess we are all just trying to keep the lights on and the conversation going. And if a billion people on the other side of the world can survive the slings and arrows of outrageous (mis) fortune with a smile and a song in their hearts, maybe we can too. I will keep my passport renewed, of course, but I will also keep tuning my acoustic guitar. It is getting harder to hear the melody over the noise. The strings seem to snap more often these days. But the wood is still good, and even if the song is starting to sound a little out of tune, I’m going to keep playing it.
God bless America. God bless India. God bless you wherever you are.
Have a great rest of the week.
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