India, Sept. 28 -- A few years ago, I was attending a family wedding, albeit a bit reluctantly. Needless to say, at my age, attending weddings is a chore, performed often for the sake of reciprocity. "No, we can't skip, they came for your wedding too," my mother would issue an ultimatum on the family WhatsApp video call. This reciprocity keeps the wedding industry alive. But, that's not what this column is about. Let me steer it to the point. At the same wedding that I am talking about, when the bride came back from the beauty parlour, one girl screamed her appreciation, "Wow, didi! You are looking like a foreigner." The bride started blushing, the five-figure make-up deal had proved successful. Only in the subcontinent, with all its patriotic and swadeshi fervour, "looking like a foreigner" is taken as a compliment. Everywhere else, it would be a slur, something people will surely take offence to. Indeed, in the MAGA world, a retort could fly, "Try and deport me, then." Indians have always been fascinated by foreign lands. Bollywood, until late, ascribed a lot of value to "phoren returnees". Anyone working hard for podium finishes at school and college a few decades ago had broadly just two goals in mind: either be the backseat occupant of a laal batti gaadi (vehicle with a red beacon, denoting high status within government) or get an H-1B visa. These two were the biggest "unlock" for lower middle-class families, when it came to gaining prestige and wealth. This is why parents would re-invest their provident fund corpus by sending kids to coaching institutes, in the hope that the latter would feature in a mosaic of passport-sized photos in the newspaper when the results of competitive exams were published. A bright kid is the biggest investment instrument for poor parents. Laal batti (red beacon) is no more, with the government having prohibited these for use beyond certain echelons. And the second "unlock", the H-1B visa, is increasingly difficult to get now. US President Donald Trump has imposed a fee of roughly Rs.90 lakh per application. As Indians have enjoyed the bulk of H-1B visas granted, it's pinching us. It's, however, a non-issue on both sides. Out of 1.5 million jobs created in the US every year, H-1B only accounts for 60,000 - barely 4%. But it is being portrayed as if banning H1B is going to encourage a farmer from Nebraska to move to Silicon Valley, talking Python instead of planters. Why is the H-1B visa such a big issue for India? It is mostly the brain drain - students from elite but public-funded universities offering subsidised education moving abroad in their prime years to pay taxes and build stuff there. They stay subservient, build no clout to influence policy in India's interests, stay quiet when Trump and his coterie go after India, and make reconciliatory pro-government noises. We often mistake their showy religious adherence for patriotism towards the mother-country. They are just brown Americans celebrating Diwali. The second-most important point, remittances, also dry up after one generation, once the parents who invested in them are gone. But our governments have always pandered to this community, privileging them in all sorts of ways, including giving them access to our head of State. But when the going got tough with Trump at the helm, we were told to toe the line. Why couldn't they protest, like the Jewish billionaires do for their ancestral homeland? The reason is we are divided even abroad. Being equitable is not in our blood. You can remove the caste system, people will find newer segregation categories to entrench division. Our country had frequent intermixing due to invasions, no single ethnic identity, and years of subjugation. Hence, there is a constant search for a clan to belong to. Our diversity is our strength, and also our weakness. India is the summation of various communities. Each community is a vector, with a magnitude and direction. When added together, their directions are different - a lot of times opposing - and the resultant vector is never strong. The moment these vectors travel abroad, they are free from standing beneath a single flag and they fall back to their communities - Punjabis in Canada, Telugus in the US, and whatnot. Hence, it is very difficult to create clout or influence for India abroad. The differences are visible, whenever I call NRI friends, they complain about other NRIs "who don't deserve to be there". The Indian population is basically a really long and slow-moving immigration queue. The majority die out before reaching the counter. And the ones who just made it to the counter, want the people behind them to leave the queue....