Oh my god! The NRIs are here again!

The annual arrival of Non-Resident Indians during India's wedding season and festive calendar has generated its own subculture of ambivalent reception—warm pride in countrymen who have made it abroad, mingled with exasperation at the particular behavioral patterns that years away from India seem to reliably produce.

The type is familiar to anyone who has spent time in India's upper-middle-class urban social circuits. The returnee NRI speaks Hindi with an acquired mid-Atlantic accent that wasn't there when they left. They compare everything unfavorably to wherever they've been living—the traffic, the service, the internet speeds—while simultaneously performing nostalgia for an India that exists primarily in memory. They bring suitcases full of American brands while ignoring the local alternatives that have improved substantially in their absence.

The phenomenon reflects something genuine about the peculiar psychological position of the long-term emigrant. India has changed. The NRI has changed. Neither has changed in quite the ways the other expected. The resulting friction is social comedy material precisely because both sides recognize themselves in the portrait.

What irritates resident Indians most is the presumption of expertise—the sense that time abroad has conferred insight into India's problems and their solutions, without the daily experience of actually navigating those problems. Democracy, infrastructure, corruption: the NRI has opinions shaped by reading and nostalgia rather than by the lived experience of standing in a government office queue.

What makes the relationship ultimately affectionate is that both parties know the ambivalence runs both ways. The NRI is performing India for themselves as much as for their hosts. The homeland they've returned to is partly the country as it is, and partly the country they needed to carry with them to survive being somewhere else.