Using America to reflect on Indian realities

Roadrunner: An Indian Quest In America
Dilip D’Souza
HarperCollins
330 pages
Rs399

Indian travel writing, never a large or a particularly vibrant genre, comes of age in Dilip D’Souza’s Roadrunner.

Mumbai-based D’Souza returns to the US, the country he had lived in for a decade.
The book opens with some very serious questions: is America a rich country because it has huge wealth, or is it because it chooses to spend its wealth in particular ways?

Travelling across the country, he discovers several things about what the US does to make itself wealthy, and life easier. 

But more importantly, he discovers a different US as well. For example, he discovers the communitarian and volunteering America, where taking out the garbage and recycling hold a community together.

He notes with amazement how the Americans, when building their telephone system, anticipated and prepared for an expansion in demand: their 10 digits are good for 10 billion numbers, whereas Indian telephones have had to add digits every decade in some cities to cope with the demand. 

D’Souza is touched by the American version of nationalism and national celebrations: informal, fun-filled and yet earnest. Here, like all good travellers, he makes a comparison with Indian modes of national celebrations, which are painfully formal. He wonders, “Why should we not celebrate the euphoria of 1947…? Do we commemorate only when we are sorrowful?”

Of course, not everything in the US is fun and efficient. After Katrina, as he discovers, the government, like governments in India and other ‘Third World’ nations, failed to help the citizens.  People have waited for assistance for years now, and many have lost their spirit. But it is the volunteers, says D’Souza, who have really made a difference in the face of government unresponsiveness. This, for him, is the best example of patriotic sentiments. 

Choosing to explore small-town America, D’Souza is astonished at the ease of access to playgrounds, parks, scientific laboratories and open spaces and, like all sensible Indians, mourns our country’s loss of opens spaces for children to simply just run. Except for cricket spaces, he concludes, India restricts access to the few, and hence we get few world-beaters. 

Roadrunner is a good read. There is a seriousness in D’Souza’s observations, even when they are conveyed in ironic tones. Using America as a yardstick to measure India is not, perhaps, such a good idea. But what he does is to use another country to reflect upon our own. To reflect is to identify problems, acknowledge failures, and offer other ways of thinking. D’Souza’s meditations on Indian realities and surrealities when he ‘sees’ America show that he knows the laws of reflection.

Pramod K Nayar teaches English at the University of Hyderabad.