Your name. You can be Chet or Jet, stay away from the sun, fake an American/NRI accent, but you will never be able to run away from Chaitanya. He will always be there, even though you might hate him today.
Gandhi, whom you hold in such contempt, despite all his controversial behaviour, is largely responsible for the fact that there is no white boot on a part of your anatomy today.
You live in a white nation but you are not white and never will be. You can fool yourself to believe you are not treated as a second-class citizen. You choose to forget the Dot Busters, the Sikh who was killed because he looked foreign and rampant racism. How many times a week do you have to explain where you are from and spend your time EXPLAINING India to Americans? I cringe to think what you say to them about India. We do not need spokesmen such as you. You will never be able to share a good desi joke with any of your new friends. If you can't laugh together, you cannot understand each other. You will always be an alien.
Yes, we are economically poor compared to the US but we do not have to suffer the highest rate of teenage pregnancies, kids coming into schools and killing students and teachers, the highest rate of suicide among college students, alienated parents and children, lonely old people dumped in nursing homes, drugs being offered to eight-year-olds (as my daughter was when she was in the UN school in New York), serial marriages and divorces. The US had a President who was senile and deaf (Reagan), one who turned out to be a serial sex offender (Clinton), and now you have one who didn't know the heads of state of major countries and ignored warnings of a terrorist attack months before it took place.The US is responsible for massacres in Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, Chile and the list goes on. The rest of the world does not view America with the rose-coloured glasses you have been brainwashed by the US media to see through. And, how much does a waiter in Jean Georges restaurant in Trump International Hotel in New York make compared to the price of the drink he is serving? The labour class is exploited all over the world.
You seem to be very upset that I am pointing out we have a national character to be ashamed of and we should do something about it. Your insistence that we stay ashamed and do nothing about it is perhaps to make it easier for you to live in a country where the only religion is to hang out at malls and accumulate consumer items you don't really need but have been diktated by advertising to buy, to keep the US economy going. It is not by accident that Americans are flocking to yoga and meditation classes to buy happiness.
You have done well to leave a country you are ashamed of. Call yourself an American but sooner or later your disguise and American Halloween costume will frighten you enough to get rid of it.
I love America's energy and have good friends there. New York is the centre for an enormous outpouring of creativity and imaginative thinking. Every country has its own problems. It is for the people who belong there to take responsibility for change.
If you are so far removed from India, ask yourself why you are so anguished with my article. Chaitanya is raising his head, Chet is in trouble.