Desi News Corp - Index

Desi News Corp - Desi News - Feb 09 - Index

REVERSE RACISM
An inconvenient truth?
The world is more accepting of desis, but are desis themselves dishing it out to other desis?
R
amesh amesh Prabhu, Prabhu, professor of Journalism, Convergence
Institute of Media, Management, and
Information Technology Studies (COMMITS), forwarded P
rasad Rao is one of the
few desis in the advertising
industry in Canada to
an interesting article recently.
have his name on the wall. He
Vir ir Sanghvi, Sanghvi, one of India’s top journalists, now director is one of the founding partners
of the Hindustan Times group, writes a popular weekly of Rao, Barrett and Welsh.
column in Mint, the business newspaper set up by the In the four years since its
Hindustan Times in collaboration with The Wall Street inception, the ad agency has
Journal. An extract from a column he wrote:
created award-winning cam-
“However, there’s another phenomenon that I believe paigns for both ethnic and
is on the rise: racism by brown people against other brown mainstream clients such as
people. Or let me put it differently: discrimination directed Rogers, Unilever, York Region
at Indians by Asians (Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Transit, Johnson and Johnson,
Kenyan Asians, etc.) who live abroad.”
and TD Bank, among others.
COMMITS, in Bangalore, India, offers a two-year full-time “Ethnic is the new main-
M.A. degree course in mass communications, and Prabhu stream,” says Rao, who has
threw the article open for discussion. His students, in lived and worked in several
varying degrees, seemed to agree that racism against countries before moving to
desis by fellow desis is alive and kicking.
Canada.
12 Desi News February 2009
NARI MAVALWALLA/DESI NEWS
He does not think it’s so
much a case of desis becoming
more intolerant of each other as
of their always having been so.
“When we run into other
desis, we tend to slip back into
familiar territory which includes
categorizing one another.
We spend the first five
minutes sizing up the other
based on economic class, community
and, of course, colour!
Their accent, the school they’ve
been to and even where they
live...We do a bit of a mating
dance, pegging the other down.
“It’s not that discrimination
by desis against other desis is on
the rise, that’s our default mode!