Desi News Corp - Index

Desi News Corp - Desi News - Feb 09 - Index

• • FACING PAGE: Prasad Rao of
ad agency Rao, Barrett and Welsh
I don’t know if we are even capable
of seeing the other as
equal. We are not egalitarian, we
don’t think of others as different
but equal, no matter what.”
Thus reverse racism is a
natural consequence of what is,
after all, our second nature,
holds Rao. We’ve all been guilty
of it at some point and we’ve
all been at the receiving end,
based on circumstance.
Many desis, he says, will walk
into a desi store, and at the drop
of a hat, ask to speak to the
owner. As though talking to the
helper or the employee is beneath
them. “Let me talk to the
boss,” they say, believing themselves
to be at the level of the
boss, not the helper. The same
people would not dream of saying,
“I’ll negotiate the price with
your boss,” at a non-desi store.
At a desi restaurant he has
heard people shout out to the
waiter, “Ek cup chai le aa re! (Hey
you, bring me a cup of tea!)”.
People who would in all probability
be full of please and thank
you at the local coffee shop. Of
course, it could also have to do
with a level of familiarity or
friendliness, but talking down
comes naturally to us, he says.
Desis, says Prasad, are good
at crying racism and demanding
equality when they come to
countries like Canada, quite forgetting
what they have been
dishing out for generations.
“When a bunch of desis get
“It’s not that
discrimination by
desis against other
desis is on the rise,
that’s our default
mode!”
PRASAD RAO
together for dinner, sooner or
later the talk will turn to how
clueless the goras are. Someone
is certain to say they are not
well-read and the rest of us will
feel all smug and superior. No
one will think to say that his
non-desi friend may not have a
library of books at home but is
a great hockey player and way
better than he could ever hope
to be. We are very good at looking
down at people.”
People of a certain economic
status are now complaining about
reverse racism because they’ve
only just become aware of it.
And that’s because, only in recent
years has the under-class become
strong enough to give back as
good as it gets, says Rao.
It’s a systemic getting back.
“People like Vir Sanghvi –
not him, because I don’t know
the guy, but people like him! –
would never have had to walk
into a government office in India
to ask for a permit. Assistants
would have taken care of
all the inconvenient little details
for them. They would never
have stood in line for a ticket; at
airports, a senior official would
have escorted them past the rest
of us! So when someone, ostensibly
from a class they could lord
it over back in the good old days,
even so much as questions them,
it becomes a case of, ‘How can
this person have the guts to talk
to me like this when even the
whites accept my status?’ There
are more and more desis at
shops, restaurants and airports
now and these people are running
smack into them. They are
extra sensitive when they are at
the receiving end!”
It also happens to people
who visit India, says Rao.
Friends of his report being
given a hard time by people who
now look down on NRIs. “You
left, we stayed back and made
it happen, and now that India
is an emerging superpower, you
want to return?”
Rao believes that as a people,
we tend to be either servile or
bossy. A group that has been
pushed down will be overtly
aggressive given half a chance.
Give someone who had to be
servile a little power and he will
exercise it.
He recalls innumerable situations
in which he was given a
hard time by another desi just
because the other person was
in a position to do so.
For instance, the hard time
the man behind the counter at
the Indian consulate gave him
over a non-issue.
“I could have made a scene;
I could have protested until the
cows came home – I did start
out protesting – but soon my
experience of dealing in India
kicked in. I calmed down and
chatted with the officer, we
spent a good twenty minutes
exchanging notes about where
we came from, etc. Then he
said, ‘For you, I will do this’. And
I thought, if you could do this,
you should do it for everyone,
not make it seem like a special
favour to me.”
In such situations, there is no
one correct response, says Rao
candidly.
“It would be wonderful if we
could say, ‘This is not right,’ but
often practicalities get in the way.
At the consulate, I know I
should have registered a complaint,
but I realized that if I
made too much of a fuss, he had
the power to make my passport
disappear into a black hole.”
The ideal response, he feels,
is to retain control of the situation
by refusing to be embarrassed.
Rao recalls being served by
a Bangladeshi at a fancy club
he was at with non-desi friends.
“His accent was so thick, I
found it difficult to follow him.
My instinctive reaction was to
jump in and decipher what he
was saying for the others but I
held back for fear of embar-
• • BELOW: Ramesh Prabhu’s students
seem to agree that reverse
racism is alive and kicking.
February 2009 Desi News 13