Immigrant Voices

When India-born Kumar Vishwanathan moved to the Czech Republic in the early 1990s to join his Czech wife, he taught physics at a bilingual Czech-English high school in Olomouc, east Czech Republic. By the time he was ready to move on in 1997, devastating floods hit the Czech Republic and he volunteered to work with Roma in the eastern Czech city of Ostrava. He has continued working with the Roma ever since and today is at the forefront of an effort to reintegrate the Roma in a sense, immigrants in their own country due to widespread racial prejudice into Czech society. Life Together, the civic organization that Vishwanathan heads and helped found, currently runs two community centers in predominantly Roma parts of Ostrava. Vishwanathan is also behind the Common Life Village, a plan to build a community of 30 homes in an Ostrava suburb that would be shared by both Roma and non-Roma families."I know countries throw up these borders and police barriers, but the world is one home. People are so much alike. I believe in the right to travel, to be at home anywhere under the sun. Having said that, [an immigrant] needs to tread sensitively on the land where he or she is going because there are certain norms, values, attachments from the people who are living there. You need to be respectful of these traditions. People have always been moving. The Czechs are also all over the world. There are Czechs in India as well. The world has always been a highly interlinked connected entity. If you look at cultural influences, so many things are of Arabic origin in Europe, of European origin in China or India. For example, Europe uses Arabic numerals. Today we have Chinese medicine, bananas from South America. The world has always been a single home."