indian connections

Indians love hero worship. From Team India players to Bollywood stars to politicians, we are known to put heroes up there. And in a country of a billion-plus, what does one do when one falls short of heroes? Do we outsource them or appropriate any body remotely Indian? The recent celebration in India over Bobby Jindal’s elevation as Louisiana Governor has once again showed our propensity to fete any Indian connection. Even as his village and the rest of India broke into a jig over his political ascent in the US, very few realised that here was a man who had never even visited India. Mother Teresa may have been from Macedonia originally, but we claimed her as our own and one may argue, that she, too, had claimed us as her own. Then V S Naipaul created waves in the literary circuit and we went all out to embrace him. When NASA astronaut Sunita Williams, born to an Indian father, went into space, we were one of the first to go to town about her victory leap. But is she really more Indian than American? Do we as Indians tend to borrow role models because we don’t have enough of our own? Or are Bobby, Sunita, etc really our heroes and we are just doing what suits us best - hero worship?