Comment by manifestdissent | Hacker News Reader

Comment by manifestdissent | Hacker News Reader

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manifestdissent

True story. I met this Indian woman while working out of the local hipster cafe. We had mutual friends. And ended up going out for lunch.

On the way back, she started asking questions about my background. They grew intensely personal. Until she was interrogating me on the sidewalk.

Unsatisfied with my responses, she just gave up and cut to the chase, "What's your mother's caste?"

Thanks to fairly unique circumstances I have to live with a plausible cover story. Because Indian people cannot stop asking questions. Where are you from? Where were you born? Why's your skin so pale? Why're you so tall? Where are your parents? What do they do? Where did you go to school? Why aren't you married?

What's worse is that the society is insular. Even in a big city, few people socialize outside of, in descending order of proximity, family > friends of the family > classmates from elementary school > people from their high school > college > (perhaps, sometimes) work.

I have met people who have gone through their entire life without ever meeting someone from a lower social class. Casual greetings with people who clean their homes don't count.

There's a lack of je ne sais quoi. A certain lack of creative energy. A kind of absence of the meeting of free radicals that sparks interesting ideas and art. Culturally, it's as if, the society has submerged itself in halon, determined to not let the sparks of creativity and genius spark.

This problem is so acute that every free radical I've met has done their very best to move away as soon as humanly possible.

I have no voice and yet I must scream

I'm an Indian diaspora person with no cultural connection to India.

When I travel, I'm often accosted by Indian (nationality) people who immediately begin 20 questions about my background, religion, caste, language, where my grandparents are from, et cetera.

One occurrence that sticks in my mind is being in a building lobby in Almaty, Kazakhstan and having two Indians see me from across the street, immediately cross the road and excitedly ask "Are you Indian?"

When I replied "No" and kept walking, they followed me for a block trying to decipher how an Indian-appearing person might not be Indian.

Mostly I find this amusing and chalk it up to cultural differences. But I can't help but conclude that Indians are almost obsessed with "placing" each Indian-appearing person they mert based on their ancestry, and find it hard to move past this.

If I'm feeling annoyed, I'll say, "you wouldn't ask a white person any of this, so why are you asking me?"

> Mostly I find this amusing and chalk it up to cultural differences. But I can't help but conclude that Indians are almost obsessed with "placing" each Indian-appearing person they mert based on their ancestry, and find it hard to move past this.

I feel your chagrin. I would be the first to admit to my privilege that my skin affords me. When I travel, I'm not mistaken for Indian and that leads to some very strange encounters.

True story, I'm standing tired and defeated in front of a border agent in a well-developed SE-Asian country. The border agent looks at my passport. Looks at my face. Looks at the passport again. And says, "Hold on. You're an Indian citizen?? But you're so white and polite!" and proceeds to tell me about how bad her night has been.

That is privilege. I was afforded the benefit of the doubt and allowed to carry on.

In India, I have never been stopped by the cops on the street. As India slides into fascism, I've oft expressed my fears to my lawyer and he's said - "Don't worry! No policeman is ever going to bother you, you're so pale and fancy and have a lawyer. He'd be scared of losing his job"

I am fortunate that I do not fear persecution when I walk down the streets. At the very least, not beyond the usual stalking and staring and ever present harassment.

In a time distant enough to be my past, I took the apartment complex's staff out for ice cream, and I saw them rush about for ID just in case someone asked. And I asked them if that was a regular thing. And they said yes, it happened to them almost every time they were out. But it had never happened to me. In an ID-obsessed country, other than for paperwork, no cop had ever stopped me on the street and asked me for my ID.

I met up with some black travellers once, and they did not share my experience. They had to carry ID with them all the time. And this was in Asia. Even miles away from American shores, they were still afraid of the police.

It is lonely. It is suffocating. It is depressing to live the life I lead. It's a society where I cannot socialize, where I cannot find nor keep gainful employment no matter what I may offer, where life moves past me at rates that are hard to understand, where I live in fear of them. A stranger, a minority, living in a strange land.

And yet, I'm privileged. It could be worse. It could always be worse.

Some day,

  Let the Priests of the Raven of dawn, no longer in deadly black,

with hoarse note curse the sons of joy. Nor his accepted brethren

whom, tyrant, he calls free; lay the bound or build the roof

Nor pale religious letchery call that virginity, that

wishes but acts not!

  For every thing that lives is Holy

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