An Indian is a citizen of India. Even if you don’t live there, as long as you hold your Indian passport, you are an Indian. I have been a ‘non resident’ Indian all my life but I make sure I go back and vote each general election and resisted repeated temptation to switch over to a Canadian or British passport (for ease of travel etc.)

Now if you hold a foreign passport then you can’t claim to be Indian. It’s your country of origin, not nationality in that case. You can say you are South Asian, Asian, Gujarati, Jat etc, but not Indian. If you take up the citizenship of any country and pledge allegiance to foreign king/queen/constitution/bush, you automatically lose your Indian citizenship. This is the legal point of view.

So NRIs and Indian/South Asian origin are two different things.

Nice post. The past paragrpah really summed it up.

However, a small digression, one of my pet peeves. i really think that free higher education is preposterous and the people when they leave India should have a mechanism to pay back for the their higer education which has been sponsored by the Indian tax payer.

err… I am opposed to free higher education generally, but at least those who chose to leave India should pay for it

- Rosh

MumbaiGirl: He/She has left out the fencesitters. :)

Sanket: The first paragraph was a reminder to myself that “understanding” is often futile.

Premalatha: Of course our contexts determine us. That’s a given. I think MumbaiGirl was talking about the differenciation. Just because two people shift from Mumbai to London doesn’t make their context the same .. because there are too many variables.

Anand: Thank you!

Hiren Shah: I don’t think NRIs need to help India at all. The way things go. I wish Swades understood that SRK needn’t have been from outside the country at all. He could be from the same community. Catharsis needn’t be catalysed from outside.

Gaurav: :)

Taran: Quite a bias there! Shouldn’t it be NRHIDFIFBTTTB? (English or British??) :))

I’m just an alien. And I’m a NRHIDFIFBTTTE: Non Resident Half Indian Descended From Immigrated ForeBears Thanks To The English. ;-)