Enough

Today’s probably been the first rough day in a while now… Woke up with a cold (which for some reason had kept away all these months) and then was stupid enough to pick the Bangalore Times and glance the first page before heading to the comic section.

Abhiash… I really didn’t read the rest of the headline… I mean, seriously, “Abhiash” WTF!!! (for the purists, Abhiash is Abhishek-Aishwarya)

Can we stop aping every pathetic gimmick the west (the USA in particular) seems to come up with?

And then there’s the other Shetty chick. Don’t know much about her racism deal yet (haven’t managed to read the newspaper much in the recent past). Some contestants indulged in racist taunts or something and everybody seems to rush in with their opinions when completely unasked for.
What does the TV channel do? They keep the show going of course… This is an international controversy, and we’re going to have loads of people wanting to watch this.

Apart from these two not-so-attractive-anymore-if-ever-considered-attractive damsels being from roughly the same part of the world and sharing a common mother tongue and being ‘bunts’ (widely regarded as Shettys, but Bunts is the accurate term for it), there’s a common thread running here.

We are subject to racism and all that outside our land because we are not proud of ourselves.
Just compare us to the Latinos. People make fun of our accent, our color etc, they don’t do the same with the Latinos. We’re roughly of the same color, and our accent is as different from the Brit or the American accent as theirs is, yet we’re subject to racism a lot more than they are.

There are a few reasons for this,
They stay fit and generally look a lot more attractive than we do. While we get into comfort zones and tend to gradually go the couch potato way.
They don’t give a damn what people think of their accent, we are always looking over our respective shoulders to check if anybody’s poking fun.

Consider this hypothetical situation, two of us (me and this latino dude) walk into this place where we’re supposed to like say a few words about ourselves and what we represent or something like that…

He’d go something like, “I’m Jose Enrique (and a few other such names, it’s the combo that’s important, the individual words generally repeat across names)… I belong to this culture that plays football, parties like nobody else, contains in it these real cool pieces of art like JLo’s butt, Antonio Banderas’s guitar (which I’m not sure he plays), stylish martial arts trained terrorists who prefer chucking grenades about anyways, and then there’s Shakira, Enrique and so on…”

What would I say? “I’m (real name) I belong to the subcontinent, we’ve had this terrific culture before hoards of goons came over and stole all that’s of material value from us and left us with ruins to live in and some abstracts to talk about and now complain when we return favor by taking their jobs and living in their land, anyways, let’s not live in the past, here’s our present. We got stupendous talent in our country you know, we are probably the only folks in the galaxy that can copy both Brangelina and Macarena. And that’s not all; we copied the term Hollywood as well.”

And finally, this is something I’ve intended to say for a while now.
They laugh at our accent? What are we pissed off about? We laugh at each other’s accents. We seem to hate each other like crazy, why would anybody from anywhere hold us in high regard? We don’t hold ourselves in high regard even.

If we really can’t tolerate being racially victimized, then how do we explain our pride in regional biases? Racism is just a global form of regional bias. What happens at our end is just a snapshot of an inadvertently bigger picture. Rationalists should be coining a new term here “pettier than thou”

How many people from Calcutta protested over Kumble or Laxman being dropped? (or even felt bad about it)

We don’t deserve to be a country. In fact we’re a lot of this and that (read factions/tribes) who don’t gel together. Can’t blame a whole lot of others for the things that we do at home.

Drifted quite a bit I guess… The intended point being, One Shetty chick basking in her apparent glory, inadvertently gave the reason why the other one’s also making the headlines. The channel in question however is laughing all the way to the bank.
The hot debates going on will soon mellow down and all will be forgotten. Lots of people will have gotten their share of sunlight till then and the issues will be put on hold till .. lets say next time.

Talk about irony.

-KD
(with seasoning by Antya)