Why I want to come back to India

A mosquito's annoying symphony filled my right ear as I sat, sweating and entirely jetlagged, waiting for the luggage belt to recover from a power cut in Chhatrapati Shivaji international airport. Half asleep, my hand smacked my ear. I groaned in what was two parts pain and one part frustration.
I hated coming to India.
The year was 2010. I was fat.I was cranky. But above all, I was unenlightened.
I hated coming to India because of the filth that smothered her streets, the beggars that squatted on her pothole ridden roads, and the attitude of most Indians to someone like me - an outsider; a child of luxury in a nation with the world's most poor.
From the immigration officers at the airport who greet white-skinned foreigners with a hearty smile and non-resident Indians like myself with an authoritative smirk, to the neighbours and distant relatives who clamour around during every visit to see the "foreign ladka" - I had always assumed that I was an unwanted, albeit amusing, attraction.
I was critical of every little flaw in India's grand fabric, and complained about everything -the smog infested highways that were always packed with erratic traffic, the boiling humidity that ruined my favourite clothes, and the abundance of stray dogs.
I was the most unpatriotic person you could find back then. Period.
Fast forward half a decade and I have resolved to do the one thing my fat, cranky self would have damned me for doing - going back to the only place I truly know as home: India.
I want to come back and serve my nation because I feel I will have robbed her if I squander my talents, my abilities and my ambition to serve a foreign land who may have been my adoptive mother for the past 16 years, but is a cruel adoptive mother nonetheless.
But why this watershed decision now? When I'm in India, I am a free human being, exempt from the racism, the discrimination, and the outright harassment that comes with the package of being an NRI in the Middle East. Whether it's the denial of equal opportunities to non-Arabs or the fact that my parents can be forcibly deported without the right to legally protest, a nice home and job is not worth the price of living as an expatriate.
But in India, I belong by blood. In India, I have a voice, and I have a future free from the predatory policies of an autocratic state that wants my talents, and not my right to freedom of expression. I can be kicked out of this oil rich autocracy any day of the week. And where do I go then? Who will catch me when I fall? My mother did when I was a toddler, and my motherland shall when I am an adult.
India is home, and yet the greatest testament to this fact is just a four-headed lion on my passport. I am Indian by blood, by tongue, and by documents. But I am not satisfied with such trivial proofs. I want to be remembered as an Indian not for the words on my passport, but for the deeds I do to serve her.
In an India whose smartest youth are scrambling for high paying jobs in the USA, I yearn to be home, and serve those that need my help - not those who can pay well for my help. People often laugh - both out of shock and amazement - when I say that I want to run for public office in India someday.
"You're NRI!" they say. "You don't speak a word of Hindi!" they exclaim. "You'll be ridiculed by the public!" they declare.
Those statements once disheartened me, maybe even discouraged me, from ever considering the radical notion that I might one day strive to serve the nation whose inheritance flows through my veins - but no more. I have found that I have every right to claim an opportunity to serve the Indian people as any other Indian does.
When I was at Yale University for a global high school program on international politics this summer, one of my professors - Paul Kennedy - said that the world is littered with problems, but we can only solve them when we ponder on the solutions, instead of debating the nature of the problem.
Yes, I have spent my entire life three hours away from the land whose magnanimous beauty has always been a sight I can only admire from afar. Yes, my Hindi is poorer than most. But in a nation whose democratic tradition allows for a tea seller's son to rise to the position of Prime Minister based purely on ability, why cannot an NRI do the same?
A great philosopher once said that a man is the sum of his choices. I never chose to be born to an NRI family, I never chose to grow up and spend most of my life in the Middle East. But I choose to return to my country - and it will be the greatest choice to summate my life.
My parents' generation were fleeing an India that was collapsing under the weight of her failures; I embrace an India who is spearheading the destiny of the world.