Pritam's Blog
India
The jet from Kolkata to Agartala was less crowded. It made it easier for me to glance through the passengers, looking for familiar faces while I was dumping my luggage in the overhead compartment.
I was in my first year of engineering, and was going home after my second semester exams. It was not just the prospect of going home that made me happy, but also that I was going to be in a familiar environment for the next two weeks. I hadn’t fallen in love with Bangalore yet. In fact, I hated it, and its people. I still had a cynical attitude towards everyone and everything from the rest of the country. The regional chauvinistic tendency hadn’t left me yet.
And so the moment I boarded the flight to Agartala, the first thing I did was look for a familiar face. There was no one, and yet the mild cacophony of the crowd, speaking in Sylheti, Manipuri, other tribal languages, made me feel alive. Everything was in place.
The person sitting beside me on the window seat, however, didn’t seem to fit here: a foreigner, a Caucasian man, struggling to fit his long legs in the tiny space. I asked him if he wanted to exchange his seat with mine. He agreed.
I was wondering what brought him to this obscure part of the world. You don’t see many foreigners here, unless it’s some ancient tribal festivals which interest few crazy academicians and historians, or some really important event in the capital. I remembered the first foreigner I saw as a kid, it was during the Ashokashthami Mela held every year in the month of April in Unokoti.
“You live in Tripura?” The man asked.
“Yes,” I replied.
Over the next half an hour, he asked me everything about my state. And it was then I realized how little I know about the place I love so much. In fact, he knew more than I did.
Apparently, he had been travelling all around the country for the past few years, and doing research on the diverse cultures of the subcontinent.
When the flight landed in Agartala, I asked him, “So tell me, what’s the common thing you have seen between the Rajputs of Rajasthan and Kukis of the North Eastern hills? Is there any common thing between the Punjabis and the Mallus, or between West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh? Between the Hindus and Muslims and Christians?”
He smiled. And said, “Yes, the common thing is India. And it’s high time you people realized it…”