Ambani, Thatcher’s Britain, and economic migrants

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google, was born in Madurai and grew up in Chennai. Microsoft’s Satya Nadella is from Hyderabad. When the ultra-nationalists agitating for a wall to be built to keep out economic migrants unleash their rhetoric, you can be sure these two men are exempt from it. They are after all pillars of the American economy.

Mukesh Ambani has Gujarati roots and was born in what is now Yemen. Dhirubhai Ambani moved the family to Mumbai when Mukesh was a toddler, and it was the city by the sea that saw Reliance become the behemoth that it is now. Yet, if anyone tried to call Ambani a migrant, they’d be shut down quicker than a cabaret at the Vatican. These labels only apply if you’re poor or working class. The prejudice too is directed mostly at those who lack the resources to fight back.

I spent five years in Thatcher’s Britain, in the shadow of the miners’ strike and the race riots that had ripped through Toxteth in inner-city Liverpool the summer before my father moved to the northwest. There were two older boys in our neighbourhood who constantly picked on me. The elder one once chased me through parkland on a motocross bike, steering away each time just milliseconds before collision. I was so terrified I nearly wet myself. To this day, I wake up sometimes with the noise of that bike engine ringing in my ears.

One afternoon, when the younger boy was pushing me around, their father came out of the house. “Oye, you, leave him alone,” he shouted. “His old man works at General [Hospital].” And that was it. Just like that, the bullying ended. Neither boy picked on me again.

One winter morning, when my father had to drop my sister and I to school before getting to the hospital, the car wouldn’t start. It was so cold the engine had iced over. The boys’ dad was pottering around in their garden, and came over to help. Within minutes, the car was fixed and we were on our way, after the man had shaken my dad’s hand and told him how much he appreciated the work he did.

One of the activities the boys enjoyed most was launching conkers and other projectiles at the windows of shops owned by ‘Pakis’. On occasion, if it was handy, a brick may have been used instead.

My father was an economic migrant, who went to the UK only to get a degree and some experience while making the kind of money that wasn’t possible in India at the time. Many of the shop owners were born and raised in the UK. It was the only home they’d ever known. Yet, they were the ones told to ‘fuck off back to Paki-land’.

That condescension is hardly an English thing. You see it all the time in India. Everything from the ironing of clothes inside big apartments to the labour on large construction projects is done by ‘migrants’. So many of the cabbies are from other states. The wheels of commerce as we know it would stop without these people, but they’re seldom mentioned in conversation without either a sneer or empty platitudes.

Those higher up the food chain are mostly exempt from that. When Amitabh Kant, the Indian Administrative Service officer, set about reinvigorating Malabar’s cultural landscape — and popularising the God’s Own Country tag for the state of Kerala — no one referred to him as ‘that north Indian’. Similarly, RK Laxman was Mumbai’s treasure, not just another “Madrasi”.

A while ago, I learned that the boy who had the honour of being the first to call me a ‘Paki bastard’ stabbed someone in his teens and spent time in jail. He is now a kids’ football coach. The shop owner’s son works in the city. Hopefully, his children won’t have to worry about bricks through windows.