It goes without saying that most expats who live in the Golden Kingdom of Bahrain are happy. Sure, we miss our family back home and the familiar contours of life in our home country. But since our work and fortune brought us here, we have settled in and, to our delighted surprise, so many of our dreams have come true.
Family and security? Check
Children growing up and climbing to new heights? Check
Starting a business and becoming an entrepreneur? Check
Bahrain enables all these dreams because – well, that because has many probable answers like good governance, world-class social infrastructure such as healthcare, education and safety. But the heartbeat of the matter is simply Bahrain’s big heart.
Here we grow in a community that makes room easily and without hesitation for all who come, absorbing their new ideas and sharing the millennia-old camaraderie that made Bahrain a much-desired port of call since ancient times.
When we travel, we all hold up Bahrain as an example of the modern Arab world – where inclusiveness and diversity are respected and everybody is made to feel accepted. That, in a nutshell, is the country whose modern birth anniversary we shall be celebrating tomorrow.
For me, the expat story is summed up in a wonderful conversation my daughter had with an elderly Sri Lankan man on a plane to Bahrain. They got talking when she helped him pull his luggage off the carousel and he told her he was back from his annual break. He had been a Bahrain resident for two decades and was a landscape gardener. Showing my daughter his weathered hands, he said: “Bahrain gave me a place to work sincerely, to practise honesty because there was no bribery – above all, my salary enabled me to educate my two daughters and put them through college. They are the first graduates in our family.”
I know of millionaire businessmen who have come to Bahrain with pennies in their pocket and prospered, starting with small samosa stalls and graduating to own large companies. Bahrain was a safe haven for hundreds of people from Pakistan and India during the cruel days of the Partition and many ‘old’ families of these countries made their nationality choices from the safety of Bahrain’s gentle shores and later, embraced Bahrain’s warmly proffered citizenship.
Having lived here for 44 years – which is twice as long as I have lived in India – I must say our family embraces Bahrain not just as a place of work but as home in the truest sense. And why not? Our children were born and brought up here, my beloved mother-in-law breathed her last here and we have never missed any of the major advantages of life in India. Naturally then, we get defensive when we feel that our Bahrain is not being given its due.
And that happens in so many unmindful ways – expat business owners who shrink from including Bahrainis in their growth story, people don’t make the effort to participate in or understand Bahraini culture and ghettoise themselves.
This National Day, let us pledge to give back to our Bahrain – in loyalty, in belief and in ‘Bahrainiyat’.
meeraresponse@gmail.com
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