Who are you?
Philosophically speaking you are a set of principles and values, morals and emotions, opinions and viewpoints, goals and karma.
Biologically speaking you are nothing but lots and lots of interconnected cells and tissues along with numerous chemical reactions going on.
Materialistically speaking you are your name, your home, your address, your people, your past and your plans for future.
What about legally? Especially in this computer age! You are your name, your Social Security Number (SSN), your Personal Identification Number (PIN), your Credit Card Number, your address and your signature. You are what lots of legal documents which you have been required to complete beginning even before your birht and till after your death tell about you. No please, no scope of identity based on hopes and aspirations, personality and character, meanings and existence. I am not blaming anybody here; after all it is not possible to include these non-measurable characteristics into your definition. Not as long as current technology enhances to that extent.
Some sample of progress in this area is visible now itself in form of finger printing, retina scans, voice recognition etc. That is merging of your biological identity with your legal identity. But much of the work in this area is in inception stage.
So now what? Whoever has all those documents that describe you legally is you! So simple and yet so powerful and revolutionizing crime of new millennium: Identity theft.
In simple (and little modified) form this crime has been occurring in India in last couple of years. The Idea is this: if you are your documents, then you are nonexistence if there are no documents! That lays the foundation of Mritak Sangh that Ig-Noble Peace Prize 2004 winner Lal Bihari Mritak leads. Result of conspiracy between greedy relatives and corrupt bureaucrats, many people are declared dead even if they are alive. And his or her property is distributed among them! After that you do whatever you want: you are dead (practically) forever! You go to official and say that you are you, but hey, what is the proof? Funnily Lal Bihari has tried committing crime and getting arrested, fighting, attracting contempt of court, getting widow’s pension for his wife and organizing his own funeral – just to let the world know that he exist, but it took him more than 17 years of fight to reincarnate!
And now lets turn towards the West. Increased use of computers and Credit Card makes you even more venerable to the identity theft. As the physical interaction in transactions reduces (online tax-filling, eShopping, etc.) you need not even be another human being for all you know! May be some computer software is replacing you! Though government and other agencies are fighting with this crime as well but, I think, this will continue as long as humanity lives.
Now a little off the track for the same topic. What about South Asian Nationals living in USA? At least my experience at MIT shows that Pakistanis and Bangladeshi are finding it increasing difficult to preserve their separate national identity. They are more often than not mistaken for Indian due to our similar physique and over exceeding number of Indians in US. And believe me, Pakistanis do not want to be called Indian, as much as Indian wouldn’t want to be declared Pakistani (which is apparently more riskier after 9/11 episode). Being an Indian, it is of no trouble to me, and perhaps it is even pride in a way, but I pity those poor folks!