Patriotism and living in an adopted country

It was not money and the promise of a more upscale life that made me come to the US over three years ago. It was the promise of a more liberated lifestyle. I always thought that the US was a place where you didn't have to explain your actions and that no one would judge you for your lifestyle. After three years of living as I please, I still believe that most of that is true. Sure, there are people here who would like you to live your life according to their morals, but that's not the average person on the street.

That's what Indian society should have been like. After all we Indians used to believe in the idea that people could have differing opinions on the same subject thousands of years ago, when you could get persecuted in many parts of the world just for going against the majority opinion (Just look the many different philosophies that are all part of the Vedic tradition) We also wrote unabashedly about sex and didn't think that sex was an anathema to religion. Somewhere down the line, we decided that it was better to be prudish and close-minded like western society of that time, just when they were beginning to become more liberal-minded. So today we are happy to justify narrow ideas of morality as being part of our tradition, while we snobbishly put down western society as being too degraded. Oh, the irony!

So when I'm chided by friends for having 'abandoned' the motherland, all I have to say is that I love India, and I love the United States too. A country is nothing but a geographical region defined by political acts and usually it has little to do with the feeling of their citizens that they are one nation. What are you supposed to feel patriotic towards? The borders? The culture? The people? Borders keep changing all the time. The same is true for culture. As for people, how are people in a country really different from the people around them?

Wouldn't it be considered silly if I said that one has to be patriotic towards the city they were born in? Replace city with state and it still sounds silly. Replace state with country and it suddenly makes sense to us. Replace country with the world and it begins to sound silly again. Isn't there some flaw in our thinking that makes us feel so?

We live in a world where borders mean less every day. I'd rather form my opinions on the basis of how things would affect humanity (sounds pretty pompous, but it's worth a thought) rather than how things would affect the country where I was born. I still love India dearly and think of myself as Indian more than anything else, but I also believe that my heart is big enough to love the place I live in equally well.