Where are you from?

This is a question that most people get asked at some point in their lives. The context they get asked however can be quite varying...

Ranging from local Chav's asking the question near a job centre followed in the same sentence by the usual statement "Go Home Paki!" to the more curious question trying to understand where you got here.

There used to be a time when those words "Go Home Paki!" used to hurt but then the more I thought about it the more I laugh...because seriously for me to do that I would have to go back in time to when my ancestors left Baluchistan several hundred or even millennia before. If anything I am sufficiently glad that they ask the question "Where are you from?" it shows that in their world things have moved on just a tad bit!

So moving on I came across this article in the Guardian this morning and immediately got thinking hmm how would I explain my history and how I got here...

Well bear with me a bit and also since a lot of this has been lost through the mists of time it may not be a fact the same as it might not all be fiction.

So my ancestors basically to escape a God in Human form who took to not liking the particular caste my ancestors belonged to went on a huge killing spree! To escape from this God who was on a killing spree my ancestors sought refuge from a local goddess in a temple who said she will protect my ancestors if they give up the sword for a needle and thread. Still with me so far?

If not then here is the long version of it here.

Somewhere along the way the descendants of my ancestors in what is now Modern Day Pakistan ended up joining the rulers of the new Maratha Confederacy whose aim was to oust the Mughal Empire and establish a separate state from all external influence. Well lets just say that but for a brief period of time this meritocracy didn't quite work out and eventually people got scattered all over Pre 1947 India.

Some time during this my ancestors had settled down south and basically hung about as things were better or they got bored moving or whatever their reasons were they got integrated with the local culture and hey presto it leads to me and my parents where the gene that makes us want to move got activated again and hey presto here I am.

So really it gets really complicated when some chav decides to tell me "Go Home Paki" as it would mean me travelling through time and space for me to reach a physical location but then the State of Pakistan did not actually exist in that time so how can I?