A question I heard often from Indian visitors to Sri Lanka during a longish posting in that country went something like this: “Yaar, how are they so clean?” Implicit, and sometimes stated in so many words, was actually this: “They are just an extension of India, the people are of the same stock, so how come they are not like us Indians?”
That was in the 1990s, when the great Indian traveller was yet to take wing and when India’s policy with its neighbours was not yet straitjacketed by China. Three decades later, more Indians have travelled abroad, yet there is even less public appreciation that India’s neighbours, however small, are each sovereign, culturally distinct, speak languages that are not Hindi or its variants, value their independence, and make economic and foreign policy decisions based on their own national interests.
