We grew up believing the West had everything. It turns out, so do we.
As a child, I marvelled at the dazzling gadgets, exotic toys, and glossy chocolates that my NRI cousins brought home from their trips abroad. My house, a mere ten-minute drive from Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport, became an unofficial transit lounge for returning relatives. It didn’t matter if it was the crack of dawn or the dead of night for my family and I would pile into the car, eager to greet our foreign-returned kin. There was a romance to these homecomings, a blend of nostalgia and aspiration. Each arrival was a portal to a world more prosperous and more advanced. At least, that’s what I thought then.
Their gifts, small yet powerful symbols of a distant affluence, enthralled me. Ferrero Rocher and Lindt chocolates, exotic and unattainable, were unwrapped with reverence. Clothes that looked straight out of a glossy magazine, and later, the near-mythical laptops possessed by my teenage cousins at a time when I barely knew what a laptop was. The implicit message was clear: the United States, and the West by extension, was the land of better things, a place to aspire to. I never questioned this belief but merely absorbed it, as effortlessly as a sponge soaks up water.
But over the years, something changed. The gap between their world and mine began to shrink. When my NRI cousins visit now, our conversations no longer carry the undertone of disparity. We discuss the same gadgets, use the same brands, and browse the same online stores. The once-coveted Ferrero Rocher and Lindt chocolates, which felt so unattainable in my childhood, now sit casually in Indian supermarket aisles. Their presence no longer excites me, nor does it signify a connection to an inaccessible world. In fact, I later discovered that these chocolates were never even American to begin with.
My sense of awe for the West has been replaced by something else – an understanding that progress is not a one-way street. Many of my NRI friends now find themselves grappling with an unexpected reality that America isn’t quite the utopia we imagined. Take something as simple as online shopping. In India, an Amazon or Zomato delivery arrives at the doorstep. In the U.S., as my friends lament, delivery personnel often leave packages outside the main gate, sometimes even on the sidewalk. If you don’t retrieve them in time, they may well vanish, to be picked up by a passerby or, more commonly, a homeless person. A bizarre, dystopian inconvenience for a country that once set the gold standard for efficiency.
It isn’t just logistics. Public safety, too, presents unsettling paradoxes. When I visited New York in 2014, a friend warned me not to leave a laptop unattended in the car for it would almost certainly be stolen. To me, a lifelong Mumbaikar, this was alien. I had never felt such a tangible sense of vulnerability at home. In India, we routinely critique our country for petty crime, but in the U.S., grand larceny often feels like an accepted reality, an inevitability shrugged off. Stories from my NRI friends reinforce this: incidents of muggings, robberies, and street harassment in cities like San Francisco, London, and Paris are all too common. And yet, a deeply ingrained cultural narrative persists. India, we are often told, is dangerous, backward, ungovernable.
This skewed perception is partly our own doing. In Mumbai, heritage tour guides eagerly showcase Dharavi, the slum made famous by the popular novel and film Slumdog Millionaire, as a prime attraction, reinforcing a reductive, poverty-stricken image of India. Contrast this with how other nations curate their histories. Londoners don’t take pride in conducting tours of council estates; Americans don’t market Detroit’s economic decline as a must-see. Why, then, do we highlight our struggles rather than our triumphs? Why do we, with misplaced irony, conduct tours of the spot where the Indian Coast Guard failed to prevent Ajmal Kasab’s entry, instead of celebrating the bravery of Tukaram Ombale, who died capturing him?
The West, for all its pretensions of superiority, is not without its own hidden fractures. Consider France, where a woman named Giselle Pelicot was unknowingly subjected to a decade of sexual assault by multiple men, including her own husband. Or Britain’s infamous grooming gang scandals, where authorities turned a blind eye to systemic abuse for years. These incidents, horrifying as they are, don’t define these nations in the global consciousness the way singular acts of violence or governance failures define India.
The wildfires in California laid waste to thousands of homes, but the U.S. despite being the richest, most technologically advanced nation in the world was for endless time unable to contain them. Meanwhile, India orchestrates the Maha Kumbh with precision, managing crowds of over 150 million largely without chaos. A logistical marvel by any standard, yet rarely acknowledged as such.
The world is neither as lopsided nor as monochrome as we once believed. India’s place in the global order is no longer that of a starry-eyed aspirant but a formidable player. The ‘reverse gaze’ is well underway. Perhaps it is time we stop looking outward for validation and start recognizing our own worth on our own terms.
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