ghettos & politics

The spread of the Indian diaspora has always intrigued me. The spirit of entrepreneurship of risking something new for higher returns gives a calling that is too hard to resist. In the Western world, there have been explorers, conquerors, traders. A part of the Eastern world has been marauding pillagers, who slowly tired of it and became settlers and new rulers. Indians - though this collective term is disputed as being a British legacy and that India did not exist as a collective before that - I still believe that too many things have tied all the generations in some kind of a common heritage and therefore tend to behave in a culturally distinct manner. Notwithstanding the differences between the different regions in India, there appears to be a thread that identifies them clearly, specially with reference to their outlook on life, money and politics.

All migrant communities set up their own self styled ghettos - sometimes for collective moral support, sometimes for shutting out the external world and creating a familiarity they are comfortable with and sometimes, simply because they look down on the people and the land of their immigration. As conquerors if you shun the natives, it leads to rebellion; as migrants if you shun the locals, it leads to racism. This view of mine is contrary to the prevalent view that racism is innate to locals - one does not realise that it could also be a reaction to the unspoken, but unconsciously or subtly expressed superiority complex of the migrants. Unfortunately, the manifestation of this is in the attacks on the undefended, innocent and the meek as they are easy prey. Occasionally, the rasher ones exhibiting bravado also get the rough end, but it is mostly the milder ones that get hit.

It usually starts with hating the weather and the food - that is universal across world cultures. However, when it manifests itself in hating those who eat such food and enjoy the climate, the ugliness becomes vivid. Intelligent as we are, we are however, naive when it comes to mental maturity and adult behaviour and the hatred shows. We simply cannot understand that respecting one's culture has nothing to do with hating another culture or its followers.

Can we really learn to respect other views? we cannot even agree in our ghettos - the Telugus in US are now in four splinter groups. each vying with each other to show how they preserve Telugu culture, particularly the caste politics! We cannot tolerate our own culture and we stoop to slander and character assassination all the time, and we call others racist? What is happening in the Indian diaspora is politics worse than what happens at home in India and is full of caste racism, which is even more hateful than racism per se. What right have we to talk about racism, when all day long we mention caste at least once and in derogatory terms of a person belonging to another caste and proving it time and again that caste prevails over everything else, no matter how many years or generations or thousands of miles you are away from it. Racism exists in us inasmuch as it exists elsewhere.