The American Dream is buffering
Same chaos, different time zone
When I left India in 1989, I was fleeing a very specific kind of chaos. I was escaping the bureaucracy where a simple signature required three bribes, ten passport photos, and a blood sample. I was leaving a culture where time was a philosophical concept rather than a practical construct.
I arrived in America expecting the Promised Land. Lo and behold, it was. For a while.
I remember walking into a grocery store in Columbus, Ohio and weeping softly in the cereal aisle. There were forty kinds of flakes. The floor was so clean I could have eaten off it, and the girl at the check out counter told me to “Have a nice day” with such aggressive friendliness I assumed she was flirting with me. She wasn’t. She was just being American.
In those days, America felt different from the India of my youth. In India, everything was a struggle. Here, everything was automatic. You booked a car, it was there. You bought a plane ticket, you got a seat. I felt I had arrived in a country where competence was the baseline, not the exception. Eventually, I parked my anxieties next to my oversized sedan and settled into the quiet, predictable rhythm of a suburbia in the First World.
Sadly, America has changed, not always for the worse. It seems that while I was busy assimilating, making a living and raising a family, America was busy becoming the India of my childhod.
It started slowly. It wasn’t the roads that cracked first. It was the competence. I used to marvel that in America, things “just worked.* Now, American customer service has evolved into a sophisticated form of gaslighting. Flying has become less like travel and more like a cattle drive run by people who hate cows. Hotels treat clean towels like a negotiable perk. Politicians have gone from carefully hiding their deficiencies to openly flaunting them. The cancer of corruption has taken hold in public service.
I left India hoping it would eventually cure itself of its legendary ineptitude. I never imagined that instead, America would catch the virus. We are becoming incompetent in a way that feels chillingly familiar. The “Can-Do” spirit that once exemplified America has been replaced by the “The System is Down” shrug. It is a cruel irony. I moved halfway across the world to escape dysfunction, only to watch my adopted home eagerly import it.
But the most jarring transformation is the national mood. I grew up in a place where people argued passionately, loudly, and endlessly. They still do. I moved here for the “civil discourse,” key word being civil. Now, I watch the news and realize that America has adopted the Bollywood model of conflict resolution: high drama, zero logic, and everyone dancing to a different tune.
The polarization here is truly staggering. In India, we have thousands of years of complex social history to justify our divisions. America has managed to achieve the same level of tribalism in the time it took to introduce the iPhone. Neighbors who once borrowed sugar from each other now stare across the lawn like rival warlords because of a yard sign. The famous American “melting pot” feels less like a fondue and more like a pressure cooker where the safety valve has been welded shut.
To add to the existential dread, I now have to contend with the WhatsApp forwards from the motherland. Friends who stayed behind seem to view America’s stumbling as a spectator sport. They send me breathless video clips about the “End of Western Hegemony” with a tone that I can only describe as giddy.
It feels personal. When I left thirty years ago, I didn’t send back postcards celebrating their inflation rates. I wanted them to do well. Yet, they seem strangely vindicated by my new reality, as if my discomfort proves that staying put was the superior strategic choice. It is a peculiar betrayal - to realize that the people you grew up with are quietly rooting for the roof to cave in on your head, mostly so they can say the architecture was always unstable. I am tempted to retort with something clever that makes me feel better. I refrain. It doesn’t make me feel better to do that anymore.
So, I look toward the future with a complicated cocktail of optimism and heartburn. The heartburn might just be the age, but I suspect it is the existential dread of realizing there is nowhere left to run. If America falters, where do I go? There is no “Super America” waiting in the wings. Mars is not an option, in spite of Elon’s best efforts to market it. I hear the commute is terrible and the Wi-Fi is nonexistent. I am, quite literally, at the end of the line.
Perhaps this convergence between my two homes is not a tragedy. Perhaps it is a strange and new kind of kinship, one that no one wanted in the first place. And yet here we are. To my friends in India, I say: put down the popcorn and offer a hand. We are beginning to look a lot like each other, and we could use the tips on how to manage the chaos without losing our minds.
And to us here in America: maybe the efficiency I missed was never the soul of this country, just the packaging. Now the packaging is torn. It is messy, and things don’t work the way they used to. But we are still here. We are all - from Chennai to Chicago - stuck in the same messy, imperfect struggle to live together without tearing each other apart.
Perhaps that is the ultimate hope. Democracy isn’t a vending machine where you insert a vote and get a perfect society. It’s a potluck dinner where half the people bring wine and the other half bring grievances. It is annoying, yes. But as long as we are all still at the table, arguing over the menu, we haven’t given up.
I guess we are all just trying to keep the lights on and the conversation going. And if a billion people on the other side of the world can survive the slings and arrows of outrageous (mis) fortune with a smile and a song in their hearts, maybe we can too. I will keep my passport renewed, of course, but I will also keep tuning my acoustic guitar. It is getting harder to hear the melody over the noise. The strings seem to snap more often these days. But the wood is still good, and even if the song is starting to sound a little out of tune, I’m going to keep playing it.
God bless America. God bless India. God bless you wherever you are.
Have a great rest of the week.
After reading your post, I accidentally read Morgan Housel's post from a couple of weeks ago: https://collabfund.com/blog/a-few-things-im-pretty-sure-about-2026/. Here is a blurb from that post that caught my attention:
"This is more hope than prediction, but I wouldn’t be surprised if in 20 years we look back at this era of political nastiness as a generational bottom we grew out of.
There’s a long history of Americans cycling through how they feel about government and how politicians treat each other.
The 1930s were unbelievably vicious. There was a well organized plot to overthrow Franklin Roosevelt and replace him with a Marine general named Smedley Butler, who would effectively become dictator. The Great Depression made Americans lose so much faith in government that the prevailing view was, “hey, might as well give this a shot.”
It would have sounded preposterous if someone told you in the 1930s that by the 1950s more than 70% of Americans said they trusted the government to do the right thing almost all the time. But that’s what happened.
And it would have sounded preposterous in the 1950s if you told Americans within 20 years trust would collapse amid the Vietnam War and Watergate.
It would have sounded preposterous if you told Americans in the 1970s that within 20 years trust and faith in government would have surged amid 1990s prosperity and balanced budgets.
And equally absurd if you told Americans in the 1990s that we’d be where we are today.
Cycles are so hard to predict, because it’s easier to forecast in straight lines. What’s almost impossible to detect in real time is the same forces fueling public opinion plant the seeds of their own demise. When times are good, people get complacent and stop caring about good governance. When times are bad they get fed up and say, “Enough of this.” And I think we’re not far from that today."
A brilliant write-up of the REAL STATE OF AFFAIRS, , both in INDIA AND THE “”THEN”” WONDERLAND OF AMERICA. Lot of changes, both better and worse has happened and does not seem to terminate at any point. AMERICA of today, is no longer of what it was, when you wanted to try your fortunes in the wonderland , which , it no longer is. The present GOVT, seems determined to wind up the BRILLIANT PAST OF THE LAST FEW DECADES. They seem to be determined to be ENTIRELY QUITE DIFFERENT, picking imaginary holes with their closest allies and jeopardising the fortune of the future, unless some miracle happens to those, who manage to determine it’s future.
But I am sure that in a short time from now, they feel the pinch and bring some sort of sanity , to its skewed waywardness and fall in line with the rest of the world, ranging themselves against their former allies. GOD SAVE THE KING.