Columbus Inverted

In the latter half of the 15th century, India was the land of dreams for European merchants. Its spice in particular was worth more than its weight in gold and the Arabs controlled the land route for the transportation of the spice from its Indian origins to the tables of Europe. The Europeans needed a sea route to India to break this stranglehold of the Arabs.

Keeping in line with common logic, most navigators were trying to find that elusive curve around the African continent that would lead them to the shores of their dreams. With one notable exception… Christopher Columbus. A man riled as a lunatic, even a heretic for believing that the Earth was round, in his lifetime. His pot of gold, he believed, lay west across the Atlantic. He was conceptually correct, but with a huge error in his estimate of the magnitude of the distance that separated him from the land of his dreams… He was not to know of a landmass that stretched practically from pole to pole and an ocean almost twice as vast as the Atlantic that lay across the Atlantic from him, before the shores of India.

The rest, as we know, is history. Columbus landed in the Caribbean and mistook it for some outlier islands of India and met some natives he thought to be Indians… An error that has been formalized, nay enshrined, in our Geography and History textbooks.

Where Columbus took off West looking for India and found the Americas (an act of serendipity lost on himself), I took off East, looking for America and ended up discovering a bit more of India. Not physically, but within my entity as an Indian.

I think I learned a bit more about my position in relation to the rest of the world, my history, my thoughts became a bit more crystallized and like Columbus, I think it was fairly serendipitous. I became acutely aware of the vast ignorance of the people around me about my culture, which is the longest unbroken civilization in the world. India had already seen 4000 years of unbroken recorded history, when Columbus was but a dream of his parents, a fact that seems lost on the people I met. To be fair to them, most were curious to know more… Did we still ambulate around on elephants? (Now I'm being facetious, but if you finished the Taj Mahal, and Bangalore, if my interlocutor was related to the IT field or Mahesh Yogi, if he were from the generation of flower children, I had pretty much run out of known territory!)

Jokes apart, I usually had an audience who were genuinely curious to know about what I had to tell them. They related to the issues in vastly varying degrees, but I always had patient and keen sets of ears to listen.

By virtue of her position in the world today, America is truly E Pluribus Unum… one among many… an erudite way of saying the first among equals. The fact to be appreciated is that this nation has welcomed with open arms the flotsam of society in the past and in a little over 200 years, forged them together over time into a nation where almost everyone in the world today hopes to make his or her place in the nation of America. The unfortunate concomitant of this victory is that the average citizen here is extremely inward looking. The world begins and ends with America (as exemplified by the NBA or Super Bowl, where World Champions are declared in a contest with no teams from outside the US!). It is deplorable that a nation with such a rich diversity of ethnicity should be so blind to the rich colours of the warp and weft of its own brilliant tapestry.

But I digress. This aggregation of words is not about my discovery of America, but my introspection, which floats in a fuzzy manner between India, America and my own mind. There is no set thought or path that I have structured these in. They are truly some ramblings, thoughts that were like those uninvited guests whom one comes to love, sometimes more than the invited ones.

I did not call them, so I have no expectations from them. I have penned them down as they flowed in. They are not even my structured thoughts. They may be amorphous biases, but definitely not crystallized opinions.