Racism

These days, "racism" seems to be topping the list of hot topics - what with Indian students facing racial attacks in Australia and the Mizoram CM raising the age-old debate about the treatment meted out to people from north east by the rest of India! Well, I am from the northeast - Assam to be precise. And, by the way, I am proud as hell to be an Assamese! 


Anyway, I did my education in Nagpur and in the US. To be honest, I face more racism in India than I ever did during my 4-year stay in the US as an international student.


To begin with, when I joined VRCE Nagpur in 1997 for my BE degree, I was shocked to see that people's knowledge about the northeast was appalling to say the least. I was asked questions like "What do you people wear?", "What kind of houses do you live in?", "Do you hunt wild animals?", etc. A lot of my school friends who had gone to various premier engineering colleges across India were faced with the same ignorance. What was more shocking was that the students in these colleges were not riff-raff average students - they were some of the brightest minds in the country.

Another interesting thing was that everyone thought that girls from the northeast are easy and that they are raving alcoholics and drug addicts who wear as less clothes as possible. In fact, I bet a lot of them were surprised and probably a little disappointed to see that we wear clothes and not leaves ! It sounds funny now, but I used to find these things infuriating. I remember an instance when one of my classmates very innocently asked me, 'Are you able to adjust here?' I thought it was kind of him and told him that I was doing fine. He persisted.'But do you get the food that you people eat?' Not able to understand my confused look, he continued.' Afterall, your staple food is pork and rice.' It was a good thing that there was a table between him and me which prevented me from strangling him. Nevertheless, I yelled at him and his ignorance in a mixture of English and what I hoped to be Hindi. Of course, he didn't argue with me. The next day, he came up to me and apologised and asked if I can hear him out. Since my temper had fizzled out by then, I agreed. He showed me the Class 10 Social Studies textbook of Maharashtra board, and sure enough, there was a chapter on the Northeast states of India where it was clearly written that the people of northeast live in treehouses and that their staple food is pork and rice !

During the 4 years that I stayed in Nagpur, I am glad to say that we could atleast change the opinions of our friends about "northeast people." Initially, everyone had assumed that all people from northeast get admission under ST or SC quota. But this was a blessing in disguise. All of us from Assam worked doubly hard to prove ourselves; a lot of us ended up in the top 10-20 in their departments, and, during campus interviews all of us ended up getting jobs. We surely gave the people who sneered at us a run for their money!

After my 4 year stint at Nagpur, when I went to the US for my Masters, I was pleasantly surprised to find complete absence of racism. It felt so nice not to be stared at constantly. There everyone was from somewhere else - so, of course, everyone blended in this cosmopolitan utopia. Though there were stray instances of attacks on Muslims after 9/11, it never translated to racism or xenophobia. In fact, I think if 9/11 would have happened in India, it would have caused mass massacre of all muslims.

Well, after spending 4 years in the US in utter bliss, history repeated itself when I moved to India to work in Delhi in 2005. PG accommodation was almost impossible to find since few were willing to keep northeast girls in their homes. Why? Oh, because northeast girls are "loose". So, life came to a full circle for me. Since then, I have been married to a north Indian for the past 4 years and hence, been deemed respectable by my current landlord in Delhi!

Anyway, now that I am older (and hopefully wiser), I can't help but ask myself if this is not racism, then what is? But, the buck does not stop with the individuals who have these misconceptions. What is the root cause of all these - is it the Chapter in the Class 10 Social Studies textbook of Maharashtra or is it the Doordarshan programs on northeast where people in the northeast are always shown wearing feathers and jumping around with spears? These are the images that are being implanted in the minds of the rest of the country. Yes, we are different. But, aren't Gujaratis, Marathis and Biharis different in their own right? I mean, isn't India supposed to be all about "unity in diversity"?