Can I “steal” the idea and give you credit?

“you don’t really think that Asian children DO live proper British lives. Perhaps you see them as living in a sort of half world that is neither British nor Asian.”

Yes, I think this is true. At any rate, for me – and you’re right, my response is drawn from my own experience. I think there are lots of British Asian children who don’t feel confused about their identity at all, who feel properly British, at least most of the time. I did too when I was a teenager, it’s only since growing up that fault-lines revealed themselves.

“I have elderly relatives that remember Bangalore with the horse drawn carts and no cars and not really much noise. They would not feel at home in modern Bangalore, or modern computer-literate India.”

This is another really, really interesting (and sad) topic, which I see exemplified in my father, and lots of immigrants of his generation. I remember one time when I was a teenager and my family was on holiday. We were walking down the beach and Mum got all misty-eyed and started talking about this being the kind of place she’d like to live when she retired. She turned to my dad and said ‘What kind of place would you like to live in when you retire?’ He answered bluntly ‘I’m going home to the village’.
Well, he’s now retired and every year he goes ‘home’ – and every year he comes back to the UK. I think there are a lot of people who left their home country with the idea that when they’d finished their working life in the UK they’d go ‘home’, and then they find that it isn’t what they expected at all, and the home they left behind no longer exists.
It makes me wonder whether it was similar, in reverse, for English people who went out to live and work in India under the Company/ Raj – did they talk of ‘going home’ after they’d made their money, and then get home to find it changed and not what they’d expected, not home at all?