What does it mean to be a Fulbrighter?

Even since I was officially recognized as a Fulbright scholar, I have been a recipient of many responses. The standup comedians brand of jokes about me being half bright, tube light, or now becoming fully bright, not withstanding, I was touched by a few sincere responses(I have to admit that the scholar phrase in the label does make me cringe and ask myself if I am worthy of such a phrase?).

The most memorable response being, receiving a phone call from my Dean at BITS-Pilani, Prof Nattu(as we fondly call him). I remember him being our registered professor on Chemical Engineering Processes, but his extremely busy schedule of juggling many things, gave us very few glimpses of him. Nevertheless, we enjoyed his camaraderie on stage, during alumni meets and many other social gatherings. He was, and is easily the coolest professor, irrespective of how much time you get to spend time with him. It was overwhelming partly because he recognized it as a significant achievement and BITSAA(BITS Alumni Association) was even more generous with their praise and offers for me to be part of their meets.But the dominantly overwhelming part was that, it brought back memories of my last semester, when being a student who was admitted in second semester in the first year, we weren't invited to the BITS Alumni dinner to the outgoing batch. I remember silently suffering that evening, digesting whatever little ego that was left within me. The incident summed up my struggle for four years for identity in a place where seniority, batch, ethnic, regional associations mattered in getting fair opportunities than your academic or extra curricular achievement. I learnt my lessons in humility and irrationality of identity politics at BITS-Pilani. Looking back, I think those lessons gave me a balanced view of the world. Honestly, my suffering was and is insignificant compared to the 5 million children dying because of lack of access to 15 cents medicine in Africa. The experience gave me an empathy(beyond platitudes and political rhetoric) for billions of people whose destiny was determined by the longitude or family of their birth. A core value which drove me to pick Hindustan Levers job over Schlumberger, though, the latter offered thrice as much into my accounts and a foreign placement. An inner voice which felt obliged to respond to the millions who are struggling on the bottom of the ladder for that one opportunity. A core value which eventually drove me out of Levers as well, when all the suffering on the Mumbai streets, pathways and stations could not be masked by my french windows at home, or the classy corporate interiors or the jet setting travels across the country and the world. A R Rahman's tune for Swadesh "Yeh joh Desh hain mera" kept haunting me on my local train, taxi and flight journeys. Life has come a full circle for me in many ways with the Fulbright scholarship, to study for two years in US - the land of self expression, honour and liberty. As I embark on a journey to find the requisite knowledge, skills and mindsets to make me worthy of serving the spiritually deprived people of my country, my prose will not do enough justice to the experience of meeting other Fulbrighters at a recent conference in Goa and the thoughts of looking forward to the sojourn. I will link a fellow Fulbrighter Achyut Chetan's brilliant essay on the same topic and quote it below as well(for those who can't access the group link)

What does it mean to be a Fulbrighter? by Achyut Chetan, Research Fulbright Fellow

 This is an online community and I know what I will say will be fast-consumed and that too only if it is kept short. So I will be brief, sound earnest and sign off as soon as I have finished. The trip to Goa, my first, was lovely, and complimented well what is soon going to be my first visit to the US. The excitement began building up at some spot nearer to the curves where the Arabian sea meets this continent. And what can be a more appropriate place than the one where Francis Xavier has mingled with Indian soil.

I wasn't as much enthralled by the talks on our role as cultural ambassadors as intrigued by the difficulty of it. The diversity, or as some of you zoologists and ecologists would prefer, the biodiversity of the US is not what we can expect to experience individually there. For we will be in ones and twos in a continent that hosts the world. Yet the mesmerizing memory that I have is that of the gathering at Goa: the depth that the many generations added to it, the richness of its varied research and creative interests, the colours of its many languages and ethnicities, the polyphony of its many temperaments, the geometry that its maps can draw. What exactly is our representativeness? What authentic India ( if it at all exists) can we carry with us? I see little hope of any one answer given the multiplicities we had created in that land of the white beaches.

Each of us will carry ourselves and return back transformed, through a daily process, slow and imperceptible.Like the fine sand that we walked upon every evening between the 23rd and the 26th, we will reshape ourselves with all touches of wind, water and human. Then why try hard to carry anything solid, anything tangible that will be make us an ambassador?

Why not try carry the message of this beauty of our brittleness and come back leaving something there, bringing back traces of our tresspassings, our changes?

Can we make this little Facebook group a barometer of those coming changes, a gallery of our vivid experiences, an honest archive of what happens when a multiplicity of human beings are lost on the other shore of humanity? Can we make it a record of those slow, perceptible and imperceptible changes?

Wouldnt it be nice if we keep posting here exactly (not so exactly in some cases) what we experience there and then ask the question that, with all its baggage of congratulations, sounded rather banal at Goa: What does it mean to be a Fulbrighter?