An NRI Fantasy, in Dolby Surround Sound

It’s a strange thing, really, how a country you’ve never been to can colonize your brain.

America did not invade us with muskets and musketeers. It came to us through cable television, pirated DVDs, and one uncle who went to Houston in 1996 and never came back. The British gave us English. The Americans gave us attitude.

Historians may never fully explain it, but sometime between Nehru jackets and Nirvana posters, a peculiar species emerged: bespectacled Indians, fluent in Shakespeare and Shaktimaan, cricket in the veins, ghee in the genes—suddenly moonwalking to Michael Jackson and quoting Chandler Bing like scripture. The Beatles cracked open the playlist, sure—but it was Baywatch, Batman, and the Backstreet Boys that stormed the living room with surround sound and sanskaari guilt. One day we were parsing participles with Wren and Martin, the next we were saying “yo,” attempting an American accent, and nuking Pop-Tarts we didn’t fully understand.

And so began the Great Indian Emigration—equal parts ambition, aeroplane food, and ancestral pressure. A soft-launch of human exports with hard-coded dreams. It started with H1Bs and ended with whole apartment complexes in New Jersey being renamed Little Noida. Somewhere in the mix were three Anuradhas per flight, one tiffin box per soul, and a prayer whispered to Ganapati, Google, and the gods of green card processing.

America, which had already mastered the art of reinventing itself between sitcoms and Senate hearings, discovered that Indian brains came preloaded with RAM, resilience, and relatives. IITs turned into unofficial Ivy League annexes. The CEO of Google was suddenly from Chennai. The Dean of Harvard had a Sharma surname and a mother who still made pickle in Gurgaon. And in a quiet lane in Palo Alto, a Tesla reversed itself while dropping bars from Petta Rap on Spotify.

Our entry ticket, of course, was English. That loyal sidekick of colonialism. The British left it behind like a forgotten umbrella at the railway station of history. We found it, rewired it, and took it to tuition. Then we added masala, logic, and metaphors about cows—and made it ours. “Prepone” entered the boardroom. “Cousin-brother” entered the family WhatsApp group. “Do the needful” entered the corporate bloodstream. The Queen recoiled. The Americans? They hired us.

And just like that, we went from Land of Snakes to Land of Startups. From “no problem, I will manage” to “circle back on that by EOD.” From spelling bees to visa lotteries. We didn’t just migrate. We rebranded. All while keeping Ammamma’s rasam powder in our check-in luggage.

We were still being told by our fathers to say “Good morning, Uncle” with folded hands when The Big Bang Theory showed us that you could make millions just by being socially awkward and slightly good at string theory. Sheldon Cooper became our spirit animal. “Bazinga” made it into university farewell quotes. And somewhere between reruns of Friends and reruns of the Indian economy, we started believing that sarcasm was a valid life skill.

Our textbooks still had Jawaharlal Nehru’s letters to Indira. But we were reading Michelle Obama’s Becoming under the desk, wondering why Indian politicians never said things like, “When they go low, we go high.” (We are more used to: “When they go low, we go lower and file an FIR.”)

America taught us many things. That it was okay to call your father “Dad” and your mother “Mom” (although Amma and Appa still lurked, ready to ambush). That your first name could be your brand. That becoming the governor of California was a perfectly logical career progression for a former bodybuilder named Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose name we still cannot spell without autocorrect. That a man with orange skin and golden hair could become President and say things like “Make America Great Again,” while half the world screamed, “Wait, what happened to it in the first place?”

And yet, for every Trumpian absurdity, there was a Barack Obama with his jazz-bar eloquence. A Kamala Harris who pronounced her name correctly on American television while simultaneously referencing her chithi in Chennai. You couldn’t script that. But it felt like it was scripted for us.

It’s not that we wanted to be American. We just wanted to feel global. That odd mix of Tamil and tap water, of Rajinikanth and roast turkey. We wanted to code in California and complain about the Bangalore traffic on Zoom calls from Mountain View.

But here’s the kicker: India, once the eager apprentice, is now holding its own. Our startups are bustling, our billionaires are tweeting, and our film stars now wave at Jimmy Fallon with the ease of long-lost roommates. We still borrow their slang—“savage,” “lit,” “no cap”—but we now remix it with memes and masala.

What binds us isn’t just tech or toast with avocado. It’s a certain shared delusion of grandeur. The belief that everything is possible, provided you have a Wi-Fi connection, a dream, and a cousin in Jersey.

Because, in a way, the American Dream had an Indian subtitle.
And like all subtitles, it was slightly off-sync, but deeply moving.

Jai Hind. Jai Uncle Sam. Pass the samosas and the sarcasm.