Dear average Australian,
We Indians are flabbergasted that some of you have racially abused our beloved Indian cricketers. Our boys were even forced to stop the match for a whole 10 minutes in protest against racial slurs. It hurts when someone calls us black. Well, some of us have dark skins, but they do not count in our country. Why can’t you notice that most of us are fair and lovely? Maybe we are not as fair-skinned as you.
The tropical sun is so unkind. But we are getting there with the help of fairness creams sold by the multinationals and endorsed by our superstars. And for the real patriots among us, there is the desi version of fairness creams made of cow dung. So how dare you call us black? You should know that it is a privilege reserved for some of us to use it against our own people. However, unlike you, racists, we just state the facts.
We address everyone south of the Vindhyas as ‘Kaala Madrasis’. Madras was the name of a city which is now known as Chennai, but it is not our fault that they changed the city name. Who cares there are many other states in peninsular India with different cultures, which have nothing to do with Madras? Kaala Madrasi means a comical dark man in a veshti with three finger-breadth sacred ash marks on his forehead, who drinks a copious amount of filter coffee when he is not exclaiming ‘Aiyyo’ with every breath, and that is everyone in Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Puducherry. Period.
And if some of these ‘Kaalas’ happen to be robotic scientists, they have this habit of eating Maggi noodles with curd as soon as they wake up in the morning. Watch some Bollywood films to learn more about our country. How is it unfair to call someone who is not fair ‘Kaala,’ if it is us who are doing the name-calling? Of course, it is so offensive when the white-skinned racists like you fail to recognise our 50 shades of brown skins and club every one of us as black.
We suggest you read our matrimonial columns for further illumination and understand that most of us are either wheat-skinned or remain unmarried. You should get out of your racist mentality of clubbing people as black and white and become enthralled with our system of categorising people as ‘Savarnas’ and ‘Avarnas’. White people discriminating against black people is so gross. You need a complex caste system, where there are so many layers of hierarchy that every caste can practice oppression against all the castes under its hierarchy level.
Talk about equal opportunity oppression. Of course, it sucks if you are at the bottom of this pyramid, but which system is perfect? We solve the problem by making such people invisible from our media and our consciousness. You should see how fawning we are to anyone who has less melanin in their skin. You will be moved to tears if you witness how well we treat the ‘Goras’, even ordinary ‘Goras’, and not celebrities, who tour our mystical land in search of enlightenment. We all are enlightened people, you see. Go to India Gate or Taj Mahal, and there will be many of us jostling to take a selfie with some random foreigner with pale skin.
Krishna Dwaipayana Vyasa, the black-skinned chronicler of our great epic Mahabharata, might have described our favourite god as Krishna or black, but we have worked around the same. Now black skin and nonstop booming laughter are reserved for the actors who play Asuras in our television shows. Krishna now has either an indigo blue skin or is an albino. We know better than Vyasa. Of course, we do not rent out our homes to foreigners if they come from countries with no snowfall. For that crime, The Washington Post had put together a fascinating map of the world’s most and least racially tolerant countries in 2013 and declared India as the most racist nation.
Some Africans were lynched in the national capital in the past few years, but is it even some news in a country where lynching is a national sport? We lynch our own people for their food choices or for daring to touch someone or loving someone, but we are the first to queue up for visas to the USA, Canada, or the Middle East. And do we even bother about what you people eat in your land, once we have our visas? We are famous for our tolerance.
When some of us become a Canadian or an American citizen, we become more patriotic towards India and wave the Indian National flag while marching with white supremacists to invade the Capitol. We have created ghettos in every city in India for different communities. Some states have made it a criminal offence to sell or buy homes in areas populated by a different community. In many of our apartments in cosmopolitan cities, we rent out to only vegetarians. We care for our environment so much. If you learn more about us, you will realise that calling us ‘brown or black’ is not cricket.
Anand Neelakantan mail@asura.co.in
Author of Asura, Ajaya series, Vanara and Bahubali trilogy