Introduction: Before superannuating in July, Ambassador Malay Mishra was in charge of the Indian Mission in Hungary, and prior to that he headed the Indian mission in Trinidad and Tobago. In earlier stints with the MEA he had been JS (NRI), and later JS (DS) with the MOIA. He pens his thoughts hoping that the RPBD in Los Angeles would pursue some course correction measures in order to get some wind in the tail of India’s diasporic engagements

Dear Reader,

As I write this column from a sparsely appointed office of the Forum for Integrated Research and Development, acronymed FIDR, where I am tasked to mentor some young and smart management and social work management graduates who hold a bright vision of servicing the poor through innovation and ideas, I think of my ersatz vision of a just and humane society against the backdrop of socially regressive forces playing out their obscurantist designs to disturb the delicate secular fabric of the most diverse society of the world.

Once upon a time, NRI stood for a “non responding Indian”, an Indian who left India suitably qualified in the stealth of night for greener pastures and better opportunities, to take life’s manifold challenges forward for his own good. Not any more, today’s NRI is very much a respectable entity carrying his motherland on his sleeve, if not in his blood system. Not yet, though Prime Minister Modi’s recent foray into the digital world of Silicon Valley with all the hype, adulation and ovation that 21st Century’s India’s visionary leader could muster, gave a fair idea of how India has come to regard her NRI breed. Honorable, as the PM succinctly put it “brains in storage”, a powerful brain gain holding enough potential to service India where more than a quarter of the population still comes under BPL, a rather uncharitable expression for people below poverty line.