YEARS ago, a well-to-do Pakistani cousin met a not-so-well-off Indian cousin in Canada. The meeting happened in the penthouse of a fancy hotel where the Pakistani was staying with her fabulously rich banker husband.

The Indian, who worked with a local human rights group, happened to be leading an employees` strike at the same hotel. Asked what he was doing in Canada for a living, the Indian explained he organised workers to fight for their rights. “But all this you could have done in India,” said the Pakistani passing him a plate of cheese and caviar.

People travel abroad for a variety of reasons but those who migrate, if they are not Karl Marx or M.K. Gandhi, do so mostly for economic reasons, which includes creature comforts as well as better healthcare and educational systems. Asylum seekers and fugitives are a separate category altogether. In the 1960s and 70s it was also the snob value that counted. Vinod Mehta, who now edits the liberal Outlook magazine, famously wrote an essay in the Illustrated Weekly of India titled `Two transistors, one wife`. The article underscored the priorities of the `foreign-returned` Indians of the period.

The financial tsunami that has engulfed the global economy may now change the equation defining the relations between the estranged cousins in the Canadian penthouse. The banker would most probably be at a loose end if he is not already heading for a safe haven if there is one left, and the social activist, with nothing to lose but his proverbial chains, would be eyeing brisk business amid the collapsing social edifice, which he had both predicted and also desired as an ideological prop. The Indian cousin knows that cyclical economic distress has been a feature of life since time immemorial. But the current crisis could be a different kettle of fish. Gone are the days when migrant workers tethered to the colonial administration worked hard for survival on foreign farmlands for a pittance.

Gone are the days of the coolie, it was claimed more recently. It was the turn of IT professionals now to get even with the empire, or so we were told. Successive Indian governments extolled the virtues of the country`s burgeoning human resources that were largely rooted in information technology competence. These professionals were going to lead the country of a billion-plus to a superpower status in the comity of nations.

But the headline in Wednesday`s newspaper was pointing to a less flattering possibility. An Indian family had been found dead in its Porter Ranch home in California. Karthik Rajaram, the head of the family, is said to have shot his wife, three children and mother-in-law before shooting himself following a financial crisis.

Rajaram, 45, held an advanced finance degree (master`s of business administration in finance) and was unemployed at the time of his murder-suicide. He was also a former employee of Pricewaterhouse Coopers and Sony Pictures. On Sept 16, Rajaram bought a gun. He wrote two suicide notes and a last will and testament. And then, sometime after Saturday night, he killed his family members and took his own life.

“This is a perfect American family behind me that has absolutely been destroyed, apparently because of a man who just got stuck in a rabbit hole,” said Los Angeles Police Department Deputy Chief Michel Moore.

Indian analysts say the incident reflects the turmoil that families are going through owing to economic hardship. In September alone, 169,000 people lost their jobs in the United States. This is more than double the tally for the first eight months of the year, with the US economy losing an average of 75,000 jobs each month before the tsunami came.

Employment has diminished for nine consecutive months, eliminating 760,000 jobs, according to the Labour Department`s report. Over the last year, the unemployment rolls swelled by 2.2 million to 9.5 million. Last week, Goldman Sachs forecast that the jobless rate would reach eight per cent by the end of next year, the highest in 25 years. Naturally, say the analysts, India has also started feeling the heat. A conservative outlook for the next 12 to 18 months ranges from cautious to pessimistic as the US financial crisis takes its toll on the country.

An Indian survey shows that mega projects and expansion plans are being reviewed, with the corporate sector now focused on managing costs and reducing borrowings. “We are just at the beginning of the problem in India. I expect January to June 2009 to be the worst period. Early signs are emerging from the way budgets are now being designed, with hiring decisions only passed if the need is critical and travel either completely discouraged or downgraded to economy class only,” a corporate analyst was quoted as saying.

People kill themselves in economic distress all the time. There are the immigrants in the Gulf from the Indian state of Kerala, for example, who surpass the list. The emirate of Dubai has lent its name to a recognised ailment, the Dubai Syndrome. Thousands of young women of the Doaba region, whose husbands are working in foreign countries, are suffering from the syndrome, a psychological disorder which is generated by emotional and physical deprivation. It manifests itself in different symptoms like headaches, chest pain, discomfort in the heart, diarrhoea and even numbness of certain parts of the body.

Over 90 per cent of those women, whose husbands were away and who visited different healthcare centres with such symptoms, were found to be fit physically but suffering from psychological disorders. Most of them were in the 25-45 age bracket and their husbands had left them almost immediately after marriage. The question is had the husbands not left the wives back home, how would they earn their livelihood?

The global economic crisis may see some or many of the husbands heading home, which could bring symptomatic relief for their women stricken with the Dubai Syndrome. But the larger debate between the cousins is evenly poised and too close to call.

The writer is Dawn`s correspondent in Delhi.

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