Ok, because I have some free time this afternoon, I'm going to take advantage of that fact and riff, Curtis-style or Edg-style, on my feelings about those of the Indian persuasion and why I feel that there is a *great deal* of racism in their culture.
First, a necessary definition. When I use the word 'racism' in past posts or this one, I am *including* in that definition *any* support of or justification of the Hindu caste system. I *define* the caste sys- tem as a form of racism, which I further define as the systematic suppression of one social or racial or religious class by those who consider themselves "better" or "more highly evolved" or "more privileged" or "more worthy" than they are. The caste system just manages this racism without the luxury of being able to recognize those they wish to suppress visually, by their physical or racial characteristics. Second, unlike many of you here, I have never been to India, or wanted to go. The place just doesn't appeal to me. So my experience with Indians is limited to daily interactions with *expatriate* Indians -- in the United States and in Europe. That said, in those environments I have interacted on a pretty much daily basis with *hundreds* of Indian nationals of various religions and, if Hindu, of various castes. About the only thing these folks had in common was having come from India and being computer programmers. So that's the subset of Indians I am familiar with. My longest experience working with Indian programmers was on a nightmare three-year project for Pepsico. The company had been sold a bill of goods by a big, famous consulting company, which had convinced Pepsi that it had to move away from mainframe technology into the modern world of client-server by converting all of their existing systems at once. Really. So Pepsi hired something like 500 consultants to do all this for them. As it turned out, given the politics of contract pro- gramming in the New York/Westchester County area, about 350 of these contractors were Indian. They had been "imported from India" very much in the same way as the pundits have been imported to Fairfield, by a few power- ful Indian families, who hired their own cousins and relatives of cousins from India, put them up at the local YMCA, and paid them $10.00 an hour for their work. These families then billed Pepsico $100 an hour for the same rent-a-programmers. So I got to sit in "boiler rooms" full of primarily Indian programmers, primarily of either the Brahmin or Kshatriya caste, and listen to the things they talked about on a daily basis. For three years. And then the experience repeated itself in other programming envir- onments such as Citibank and Salomon Brothers and Ciby-Geigy and ING. What they talked about shocked the shit out of me, and forever disabused me of the notion that Indians were *in any way* more "evolved" than anyone else on this planet. The first thing that shocked me was the almost *instantaneous* way that the Indians I worked with "bagged" another Indian upon meeting him or her for the first time. All it took was hearing the name. From that everyone *instantly* knew what religion the person was, and if Hindu, what caste. And their attitude towards the person shifted equally instantly, based on that religion or caste. A "newbie" would join the group, and everyone would be friendly and outgoing, and then they'd hear his name. At that point about half of the room would move away from the newbie and go back to their seats, and never speak to the newbie again except in the necessary course of business. I got to sit in those rooms and hear how these guys, be they Muslim, Brahmin, Kshatriya or whatever talked about women, and the very *different* ways they talked about Western women (hos, the lot of them) and Indian women (either saints or hos, depending upon their religion or caste). Lemme tell you, *that* was a real education. I got to sit there and listen to the Brahmins brag about how a group of 10-15 of them had gotten together the night before and kicked the shit out of a Kshatriya guy who had dared to ask out the sister of one of the Brahmins. They joked about how long he'd spend in the hospital. This happened more than once. I got to sit there and listen to some of these guys talk about how they were being taken to the cleaners *by their own relatives*, and their sense of powerlessness about being able to do anything about it, because of these relatives' power and influence back in India. So when I say that (*besides* the things I've read about this Richard Gere thing in articles from India posted elsewhere) I suspect that racism/the caste system has a lot to do with it, it's based on the above experience with *Indians in the world*, NOT the Indians that people who are really into spiritual trips think of as Indians. OF COURSE racism/the caste system had something to do with it. The very group that started all the ruckus is a well- known Hindu supremicist group; the judge they got to order the arrest of Richard Gere is a well-known "mouthpiece" for this group who shares their agenda. It *also* had to do with the incredible hypocrisy with which India addresses -- or rather, from my perspective, *fails* to address -- the issues of sex and gender. Only in India (or a similarly religion-damaged Islamic society) would you have laws that classed kissing as obscenity. And the very judges who passed these laws are sometimes the owners of brothels, and treat the women in them in the same ethical manner as the rich Indian families treated their relatives at Pepsico and the other companies I've worked at. Does this all sound biased *against* Indians? Well yes, except that I've found pretty much the same to be true about *any* religious or ethnic group I've ever worked with. The same attitudes and talk takes place in "boiler rooms" full of Born Again Christians in the Midwest and in primarily Jewish companies in New York. People are people, that's all. I do not for a moment think that Indians are *more* corrupt and unethical than any other group of people I've interacted with in the world of business, just *as* corrupt and unethical. But when it comes to racism, well...yes, my experience with Indians is that they really *can* be more racist than some of the other religious or ethnic groups I've worked with. So shoot me. That has been my experience. I don't really know much (or care much) about Richard Gere. I think he's done some fine work onscreen as an actor, but besides that I have no feelings for him one way or another. I *certainly* don't see him as any kind of "fellow Buddhist" or representative of Buddhism. He's just a handsome guy who can, on occasion, pull off a very difficult role in a film. He might be a total asshole in real life as far as I know, and it wouldn't bother me a bit to find that he was. But I think that his "excesses" in this silly affair have been blown out of proportion by a bunch of people who have a very, very, very established agenda -- that of Hindu supremacy in India and the social and economic suppression of other religions and the lower castes within their own religion. *They* are the ones who feigned outrage over this horrible public kiss. *They* are the ones who are benefiting from all the publicity, not the public and not India. I think they suck. Richard Gere might suck, too, but in my book these fundamentalist nazis suck more. So shoot me. Unc
