Alien Lands

A pandemic at our shores doesn’t diminish the interest in the foreplay to elections in a distant land. An election which is of interest, not just because it will be held in the most powerful country in the world, but rather due to the character of the debate, issues long swept under the carpet, coming to the fore and sometimes making us question, uncomfortably , our own values.

The Vice-Presidential pick is a child of immigrants, parents who migrated to a different land long before it was common to do so. The support structures, information and channels that are in place today were lacking in the 1950’s and recent immigrants, albeit to a different land, like me cannot help but wonder at the courage of those early pioneers.

My first trip abroad was not as an immigrant, I came to Japan for a week long trip, on a training assignment. When I landed at the Narita airport, on a cold, dark winter evening in January, I did not know that this city would be my home 16 years later.

I came with a colleague, who came for a longer trip and hence packed accordingly. One of the memories, quite a few are hazy, is dragging one of my colleagues few suitcases through the Tokyo subway, on my way to the company rented apartment.

I remember that a couple of middle aged ladies , amused at my struggle in dragging a 30 kilo suitcase down a long flight of stairs, placing one at the bottom of the stairs, then going back for another, said ‘Good idea’.
I have no idea what they meant.

Then a colleague, who was supposed to meet us at the subway station and guide us the last mile to the apartment, turned up, in the true Indian tradition, an hour later and acted as if it was normal.

It wasn’t normal to stand in the cold winter evening, most of my winter clothes still inside the suitcase, shivering, walking to the telephone booth, calling him, walking back, waiting and then again calling, trying to make him aware of the discomfort of standing outside on a winter evening.

Finally back in the apartment, after a dinner of a ‘Ready to Eat’ Indian meal, I walked to the nearby convenience store to buy milk. Walking back in the biting cold, a light snow started falling. It was my first experience of a snowfall!

I stayed through the week, moving in to a hotel, traveling around downtown Tokyo, buying a video camera at Akihabara, the electric town and taping my experiences. There was my first Japanese meal, fried Oysters(still a favourite) , my first Japanese drinking experience, where I ate squid thinking it was carrot, till I came to the tentacles.
The tentacles went with a cup of Sake, I needed something to wash them down a gagging throat.

I traveled to Nagoya, visiting the main office of my employers, getting taken out by my colleagues for a drink at a restaurant, a dinner at someone’s house, short pleasant trip full of good memories, which made it easier to move here for a longer term, when my employers gave me a week’s notice to move to Japan.

One of my old bosses, an Englishman, once commented that it is easy for Indians to move anywhere, because they have a support system wherever they go, a cousin, a friend, or a friend of a friend, something or someone that ensures that no place is alien.

Traveling is much more convenient today than it was in those days, cellular roaming prices have dropped, you have cheap data to use with navigation apps , you can discover everything about almost any place with a few clicks, from what they well to the languages they speak.

The support systems still remain, whether we choose to use them or not. But technology is the biggest support today, online travel agents, review sites, online delivery sites, a traveler sometimes is as knowledgeable as a native when he or she reaches a new place.

That brings me back to what the mother of the Vice-Presidential candidate might have had to go through , arriving in America, alone in the 1950s, without the support of either technology and probably, people.

My father moved within India, from the south to Patiala, a small town, in the mid 1960s. The North Indian town might have seemed more alien to him, considering he did not even speak Hindi, than the Japan of the early 2000s , was to me. The only anecdote which I remember today is of him eating a cottage cheese(Paneer) dish in a restaurant thinking he was eating meat. He was a vegetarian till the end.

My father passed away many years ago, I didn’t have the appreciation then, as I have now, of the challenges required in leaving your hometown, the familiar and transplanting your selves in a totally alien land.

In today’s world there is nothing that is alien!