My friend Ramesh and I have a running joke that we will one day write a travel book called The Coconut’s Guide to India (©)—an instructive, descriptive work for our brothers and sisters born throughout the diaspora making their first trip to the motherland, and all the dastardly pitfalls it might entail. To be taken with a pinch of salt, and a dash of garam masala, naturally.
The title may need some tweaking, coconut is after all a rather offensive term: brown on the outside, white on the inside, and as frequent visitors to our homeland who speak the lingo and know the customs, we thankfully don’t qualify; but we’ve always felt our fellow British Asians who cannot or will not make a trip to their ancestral country are missing out. Not just due to its beauty, history or notions of connecting with one’s identity, but also because of the welcome extended to those that hold the status of NRI.