Like him, I too was raised to believe India was one country; all Indians had an equal right to both the glories and the sorrows of our nation. Growing up outside India under the gilded umbrella of the Indian embassy, I only knew I was Indian. But back in India, in college, I learnt for the first time that other Indians saw themselves as Gujaratis, Bengalis, Christians, Parsis, Muslims, Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Nairs, Dalits, Marxists—anything, that is, other than the sort of "just Indian" I'd grown up believing I was. It was a painful and disturbing realisation because it immediately recreated, in what was supposed to be my own homeland, the same uneasy insecurities that caused so much heartache during my years as an Indian schoolgirl amongst children of other nations, some aggressively nat ionalistic, contemptuous of poor nations, of dark skins.