No, you're right. Not worth sweating it. but left a bad taste in my mouth.
You know, when I was forty years younger, there was no question about these things. I was Indian and felt cocky about it, poor country and all taken on board. I was a Hindu, and confident and secure and not bothered about what others thought, because we were the most relaxed and most tolerant of all the people around. There were some scumbags who thought differently but they were so clearly sub-human we never paid them any attention. At one school, I had Sardar and Naga friends. At the next, that I passed my exams from, there were Jews, Armenians, and other exotics. Nafisa Ali, much younger, was the water-baby we all doted on, and her being Muslim was so totally irrelevant. After school, I'd hang out with a very close friend, whose people had come from Iran four or five generations before. Nobody told me I was different or supposed to stay away. There were two close Parsi friends, and we got on well, since I had been carefully briefed that all Bawas were crazy, and I would have to go easy.
I hero-worshipped my school captain, the grandson of the Nawab of Chhatri. His sister had married into a Pakistani family, and I blinked a bit at that, but thought it interesting that he had a different country that he could go home to, and that was that.
After passing school, before joining college, a friend and I decided to swash a little and buckle a little, so we pinned two plastic hammer and sickles onto our shirts and strutted into school, and the vice-principal. an elderly Anglo-Indian, known to be a tartar, saw us, barely to keep a straight face, and said, "Ah, we are fired up for the revolution, are we? Why haven't you collected your character certificates?" That kind of let our air out a bit.
What happened to that world?
