Archive for the 'Racism' Category

There was a time, in the pre-Internet days of the early 90s and late 80s, when I would sit at the library of the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta (my father was a professor there) and read, with a schoolboy’s sense of wonderment, issues of “Time” and “Newsweek”, marveling at everything from the quality of pictures to that of the reporting and of course the writing. The operative phrase here is  There was a time because these magazines have changed markedly since then, teetering close to financial ruin [Newsweek magazine is on sale after multi-year massive losses and Time magazine by the end of 2009 had lost 35% of its readership from the previous year while Newsweek lost 41% (link)]. And nothing perhaps symbolizes the rot more than Time USA’s bigoted attempt at humor, Joel Stein’s [picture to left] “My Own Private India“, a piece that twenty years ago would surely not have made the final published cut.

Continue reading ‘My Own Private Bigotry’

I just do not understand all this finger-pointing, all the “there is a strong undertone of racial ill-feeling towards Indians in Australia” canard that is getting play in the popular Indian press.

Give me a break mite.

I mean if there is one society that is sensitive to racism it has to be the Australian. Remember all that outrage in the Aussie Press when Harbhajan (whose cousin’s death in Australia was passed off as “suicide” apparently without a post-mortem) supposedly called Symonds a “monkey” and sections of the crowd made simian gestures at that same man. At that point of time, I remember the Australian press telling us how sensitive the country is about issues of race, sensitive in a way that us Indians, with a history and continuing tradition of caste, cannot even comprehend.

Continue reading ‘Race Saanson Ki’