Racism and Casteism in india is Socio-economic. The problem is both
individual and collective. Personal Jealousy combined with Collective dogma
becomes a potent Poison.
Unfortunately, the educational system in India has not devoted enough
time for the subject of 'ethics'. I believe the subject of Ethics should be
taught right from Nursery School.
TurquoiseB <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 14:55:09 -0000
Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: Ever wonder where the prudery in the TMO came from?
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
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