An anecdote mentioned in Khushwant Singh’s book (Women & Men in My Life) reminds me to connect with this topic. Though this anecdote may not be a good one to explain or connect to the theme of this piece but I thought presenting some light matter such as this can be entertaining to some people atleast.
In the middle of the book we find a story based on one of Khushwant Singh’s friends Romesh Chander, or Charles in Government College, Lahore.“Charles came to Government College from Bishop Cotton School, Simla, which was largely an Anglo-Indian institution. He was a natty little fellow and as much of a Brown Sahib as he could be in his five-foot-four-inch height. He wore a pith solar topee sporting a pheasant feather on one side and a strap to go under his chin. He wore it at an angle as Anglo boys did. His speech, like theirs, was punctuated with yes mun, no mun. He did not care much to mingle with us natives and preferred to be with the handful of Anglo-Indian boys who made it to the Government College. He tried to enter their social circle in Lahore, which was centered around the railway colony.
“He soon discovered that having nothing Anglo about him except his speech, he was not welcome. He had no option but to seek the friendship of natives who could speak his lingo. At first he liked to be known as Charles or Charlie. After being rebuffed by the Anglo-Indian circle, he tried to drop his English name. Whenever introduced as Charles or Charlie, he would clarify the name is Romesh Chander. He did not fully succeed in changing his identity and came to be known as Romesh Chander Charlie.”
Khushwant Singh later discovered that Romesh Chander spoke Punjabi and Hindustani as well as any of the natives. His solar topee disappeared. He began to dress in kurta-pajama. That was Romesh Chander’s second reincarnation.
Here, we are raising a set of concerns to understand why many people have weakness for alien culture. The failure to realize that culture ‘determines the success of a society’ can be one among several reasons. Two, a notion that it is not easy to go against the tides of time and so they feel they should be resilient enough to allow themselves to walk in tandem with the trend—not doing so would mean inviting stagnation. But the fact is—by taking advantage of this message they have messed things up by indulging in excessive imitation.
