The third way

In "White Skin, Brown Soul," an HT reporter takes on an interesting phenomenon -- white, natural-born citizens of India (primarily "the children of foreign immigrants — missionaries, social scientists, businessmen — who came to India in the 1950s and the 1960s").

Reporter Riddhi Shah exposits, "Much has been written about the NRI experience -- their conflicts, their battles, their struggle to come to terms with their mixed identities. But the stories of these reverse NRIs -- white on the outside and brown on the inside, 'white chocolate' to the NRI's 'coconut' -- have gone largely untold."

The story itself leaves a lot to be desired -- it's only about 300 words and attempts to synthesize the narratives of five or six people, all without really offering context or relaying the particularities of any one person's situation. Still, the topic poses interesting questions about identity and belonging in a world in which traditional boundaries are increasingly blurred. It stings when I hear people calling me gori and firang, and when children point, laugh, stare, sing songs. But I can only imagine how it would feel to have grown up in the subconty, to consider oneself Indian, and to experience the same day in and day out, endless explanations of life never quite either here nor there.