The great divide

I've had a couple of conversations, over the past couple of weeks, that were centered around us NRIs, including our contributions to our homeland. I won't really get into the economics of it, because I'm probably the least-equipped person to talk about GDP; to be honest, I didn't even know what it stood for until yesterday. However, I will get into what I call "The Great Divide" or TGD.
There is a small restaurant near my college that sells authentic north Indian food. By authentic, I don't mean cholesterol-stuffed butter naans and heavy creamy daal makhanis. They serve good, homestyle northie food, stuff only the northies will like it because it's what they grew up eating.
I've been to this restaurant so many times that I think I'm pretty close to becoming a regular. The first time I ate here was with a friend who grew up in the north. Although she's actually a Tamilian, she speaks more Hindi than Tamil, so it's safe to call her a northie. With the food that we ate, she was on home ground. The next few times I ate there was with an NRI friend of mine, and that is where things get interesting.
My dad grew up in Delhi, so I was used to eating northie-type food. "Roti and daal with pyaz." — Roti and Daal with raw onions and lemon on the side. I might not speak the language, but when it came to north Indian food, I knew how to eat it. My NRI friend, however, was originally from Kerala. He didn't grow up in a house where Delhi cuisine was common place. He loved his "parrota" and his "puttu"; in fact, over the past semester we've rarely eaten anything else for lunch. Despite all that, he surprisingly didn't need much convincing to try out the food there, and he loved it so much he kept coming back with me. This might not seem to be a big deal to you yet, but let me put it into perspective.
A few days later we decided it was time to get our other friend to come here and eat with us too. Now this was going to a bit tricky for the following reasons:
1) He was a hardcore non-vegetarian. He hates eating pure vegetarian food and needs chicken in some form or the other in every meal. Now, as far as northie food goes I wasn't too sure about the non-veg side of it since I am a vegetarian. I could vouch for the veg standard, but neither did I nor my NRI friend have anything to say about the non-veg fare.
2) He was a Chennai boy. South Indians, or even Indians in general, are not known for their gastronomic flexibility. To convince him to try something other than heavy banana leaf lunches or any other non-veg dish his mom makes was a feat.
This brings me to my point. What makes my NRI friend different from my Chennai boyfriend? They are both south Indians, they both love their mothers cooking. Both of them would probably shave my head in my sleep and sell my hair for a plate of chicken biryani. So why is it so difficult to get the latter to try something from the opposite end of the country?
It's because the former is an NRI, the latter is not. What I mean by this is when we grew up outside India, we grew up in a blender. We had a good helping of northies and southies, with a little bit of east and west thrown into the mixture. As NRIs, we grew up experiencing all of India in little equal bites. Our Mallus grew up eating rotis with daals that were not kurma. Our Punjabis had their tastes of idlies and sambar way before 'Chennai Express' made them cool. There were many ways in which we were forced to come together as Indians and not as people from different states. It's like what Shah Rukh says in 'Chak De India', for us India was first, state came later.
It's ironic how growing up outside India taught us to be more united as Indians. My university has a very large population of non-Tamil students, so it's really very easy to see the great divide between the northies and the southies. Every single time I go to that small little restaurant, I'm the only one speaking Tamil there. Sure my Hindi is so atrocious I end up placing my orders in English, but at least I'm a south Indian girl eating some north Indian food.
We need to break boundaries if we want to get somewhere as a nation and the way to do that is through food. As everyone knows, a way to a woman's heart is through her stomach, and India really does love to eat, especially biryani.