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Will the NRIs now put their money where their mouth is?

The best thing about patriotism -- at least in the Indian context -- is that there is no yardstick to objectively measure it.

You needn't have voted in an election all through your adult life, and you could still be patriotic.

You needn't have paid a single paisa as income tax, all the while living on Cuffe Parade, and you could still call yourself patriotic.

Why, you could even preside over a pogrom, and still pick on the patriotism card as your defence -- and this is no fiction of imagination.

Or, you could be one confused desi living 5,000 miles away, earning in denominations that make your kin back home turn green with envy, your last visit to the country was 10 years ago when you had to perform your father's obsequies, the fleeting thoughts about India rushing into a cascade only when you catch the latest blockbuster from Bollywood or as you recall the ache of unrequited romance back home.

But there always was the need to retain one's Indian identity, even if not the passport. Sacrificing the latter could be explained away, but it was clinging on to the former, in a land awash with the plasticity of non-culture, that was difficult. Thankfully, this is where patriotism comes in, even if the masses back home fail to comprehend this concept of mental, and sometimes emotional, and not physical obeisance.

Fortunately, as I said earlier, there is no yardstick to objectively measure patriotism.

It's no myth that India sends out the largest brains trust to run the rest of the world, even if the common pool which this talent comes from has failed miserably to make a difference to a nation that surely deserves better. Perhaps my friend was right, when he defined the NRI as the New Refined Indian, as opposed to the rest of us stifled by our inability to convert our dreams for a better India into reality. Obviously, we become better Indians when we are abroad.

But even the greenest of greenbacks does not compensate for the obscurity of being an Indian overseas. It is easier to handle the fact of coming from a land of one billion that is unable to win a single Olympic gold, if you are part of the collective maatham that follows any international sporting endeavour. But where you are an Indian living in a land of the physically fit, the macho, neither the fact of your country's sporting misadventures or the beating it is taking in Kashmir really shores up your pride in being Indian.

It won't be all that difficult to handle, but the worse part about being an NRI is the constant explaining one needs to do to the full-time Indians back home, who genuinely don't understand or pretend not to understand how someone who is not participating in the ups and downs in the nation's course could lay claim to being an Indian. And as India began to shed its isolationist policies and started taking in the world, slowly but surely, a new stick was found to beat the NRI with: that he wasn't putting his weight behind Indian efforts to garner investment, unlike his counterparts from China and even smaller nations.

Thankfully for the NRI, there wasn't much of a coordinated effort from the successive governments to tapping the enormous -- some say, putative -- potential of the Indians abroad, and he could offer this in his defence. Perhaps New Delhi was not alive to the importance, the clout enjoyed by overseas Indians in their land of adoption, used as the political establishment is to treating its constituents as favour-seekers, not favour-givers. Whatever the reason, the persisting unwillingness on India's part to rope in the NRI led to a feeling of neglect among those that mattered, even if there was sporadic, uncoordinated attempts being made to pay back one's dues in whatever little way one could.

May 11 and 13 willy-nilly changed the stalemate. As the overseas Indians, for long chafing under the burden of coming from a country that did not have the balls despite its size, turned frenetic over the nuclear explosions, it was deliverance day for them, pure and simple. And when the West stirred itself and cracked down on India, it was the NRIs again who were in the forefront of challenging the punitive steps. The sentiment that ran through the chat-rooms that I visited and took part in was one of derring-do, of picking up the gauntlet, of doing something. What would you like us to do, we are ready for anything, was a refrain that I have heard from numerous NRI in the last couple of weeks.

Given the extent of support that the saffron brigade enjoys among Indians overseas -- as demonstrated by the outpourings on the Internet -- it is perhaps in the fitness of things that it was the Bharatiya Janata Party which has rolled out the red carpet for them.

I don't recall any previous government in India making the kind of overtures that this government has done to a community abroad. The NRIs, it is obvious, have been given their due, have been acknowledged as an entity that counts, and in fact their assistance has been sought in building up India in no uncertain terms.

Detractors of Yashwant Sinha who repeatedly point out that the finance minister has not made any provision for Western sanctions in his Budget, refuse to admit that this is the force that the government hopes to put together to take on the Western bullyboys. And as Sinha has pointed out in his post-Budget declarations, the cost of the sanctions is yet to be quantified; and hence, the kind of assistance that the BJP government seeks from its constituency has also been left unstated.

But it is clear: in a sense, the gauntlet of patriotism has been thrown before the NRI. What the government has not overtly stated is that this is the time for all good NRIs to come to the aid of the country.

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