As the political war rages in Zimbabwe I have been engaged in a very different but another controversial debate with my friend from there. My colleague working in New York for the last four years wants his son to learn his native language and culture and is deliberating on whether he should send his six-year-old son to a school in Zimbabwe. He insists it will not be a boarding school situation since the little boy will be staying with his grandmother — and that too only for two or three years.

While I appreciate the sentiment behind my friend’s initiative — that of inculcating in his son an African identity — I find it hard to reconcile that a child will be separated from his parents no matter what the motivation. But the frequent arguments I have been having this past week made me question the bigger picture.

In today’s globalised world people often live far away from their state or country of origin, but geography changes little. We recreate our cultures no matter where we live. Is it because we fear losing our identity and traditions, or, a question of wanting too much?

American Bengalis are meeting this weekend in Toronto at the North American Bengali Conference, a yearly celebration of Bengali culture and a time to watch the latest theatre productions and Tollywood films, and to buy saris and jewellery from Calcutta. Thousands will take time off from work to be at this highly anticipated social gathering much like they do every winter to visit Calcutta and spend time with the family they left behind.

Year after year they lock up their suburban houses for a few weeks or months for a trip to their second homes. This is the time they hope their children will start eating fish, learn Bengali and listen to Rabindrasangeet. They attend numerous winter weddings and buy stacks of Amar Chitra Katha, Jataka folk tales and Bengali DVDs from the fancy stores on Park Street, hoping to entice their American-born children into the Bengali fold.

They remind me of my father who many years back would hunt through bookstores to buy Bengali children’s books so that his two daughter learnt how to read and write in their mother tongue. Inspite of all our complaints, many winters in Gangtok and summer holidays in Delhi were spent learning the alphabets and struggling through stories of Gopal Bhar. It wasn’t fun for us girls who wanted a study-free vacation, but today I cannot dispute the advantages that come with knowing one more language, especially one’s mother tongue.

For many in the US, the tug of the homeland is even stronger. They plan and save and post-retirement, take up part-time residency in Calcutta, spending up to half a year in their posh apartments along the Bypass. They relish the puja festivities, the film festivals and the book fairs, which inspite of the intermittent years continue to captivate their minds.

This cultural cord takes some by surprise, especially my second-generation friends. Many have grown up in the US and unlike their parents have few memories of the homeland. While they may have resisted all the things their parents wanted to teach them, they gradually start identifying with their culture, often innocuously through Bollywood films, a designer salwar kameez, or volunteering for a South Asian NGO. They drift into conversations about India’s history or pick up the latest book by an Indian author and start recognising elements, which should have been unfamiliar. As they grow older, they are astonished by their own ties to the culture and identity of their parents, their tastes and preferences, which seemed so alien only a few years earlier.

This makes me wonder sometime whether culture and identity is really something that one can truly erase. Or is it something that is bound to surface at some point of our lives, whether we want it or not? If so, then why do we try so hard to push ourselves and our children towards it? Why do we struggle so hard to balance the traditional and the modern, the Indian and the Western and teach something, which perhaps is so intrinsic that it requires little learning?