Most of the masseuses in Taiwan are blind, and the hospitals, especially those run by a religious group will often set aside a space for them to practice their profession. The other day, I was waiting to see the doctor at the local hospital, and decided to get a massage.

The masseuse realized my English was better than my Chinese and asked me where I was coming from. I replied, “United States of America.” He turned to a seeing woman next to him and asked her what I looked like. Specifically what the color of my skin was (I could comprehend that much despite my poor language skills), then he turned to me and said, “Are you White?” what reply was he expecting me to give? Yes that I was White, so should be treated better. But he already knew the answer, so was he testing the “truthiness” of a non-White person? I told him no, I was browner than the brownest Taiwanese, and that the US had many people of different races and colors, and America should not be equated with being White, it was a big diverse country. I was suddenly in possession of language skills that normally elude me.

These days I have made it a point to say ‘Meiguo’ when I get the ‘where are you from’ question, not because of any perversion of patriotism, but rather to do my small bit in undermining the idea of a monocultural world (Taiwan has immigrant workers who are largely invisible and a huge number of foreign brides from China, Vietnam and Indonesia). I can remember the time when I first saw “Do The Right Thing” at the USIS in New Delhi. It was a revelation, I had never seen a movie where Black people were the main characters, and not servants or completely invisible. This was in 1989, which is not that far in the past.

Ten people have been beaten to death by a group of villagers in the northern Indian state of Bihar, officials say.

Every time I read an item like the above, I think, “Those people who got lynched were probably Denotified Tribals,” the report doesn’t tell you who the people who were killed were, who killed them, and the story always ends in the same way–nobody was punished for lynching a defenseless person.

And then if you wait for a bit, you find out that they were Nats, a Denotified Tribe from an article by the tireless Mahasweta Devi, who has to remind readers, yet again of the terrible injustice done to India’s Denotified Tribes, and has to conclude the article with:

Dalits, caste Hindus, Muslims, everyone who feels like it can kill them. When will the state government start doing something to ensure that the Nats do not have to live in fear of being lynched any more?

This week Tehelka (thank you, Anant) has a harrowing report by S. Anand about the pattern of brutality visited upon those who exist on the margins of the margins.

Here is a picture of a man who was accused of stealing a gold chain. He has been tied to a motorcycle in preparation of being dragged through the streets of Bhagalpur in Bihar. Two policemen are part of this mob.

Lest you think that this is the problem only of Bihar, think again. A ‘Gypsy’ woman was attacked in Kerala, woman were killed in Assam for being “witches,” and a community of Pardhis were unlawfully evicted from their homes in Madhya Pradesh.

S. Anand argues that the State in India is very weak, and these incidents aren’t about a brutal State savaging its citizens, but citizens brutalizing those they consider non-citizens.

While, I don’t think Anand is wrong, I wonder what the role of the police is in all of this. They are an arm of the State, yet are the most flagrant breakers of the law. They are often in collusion with corrupt politicians, powerful criminals and the rich and powerful in the area (who are often one and the same person). These are the people who constitute the State as most people experience it. I suppose there is the state and then the State.

Update: Two policemen involved in the incident in the picture above were exonerated by an inquiry committee set up by the State Government, one of the policemen is I believe the man on the motorcycle. What a disgrace.

An online exhibition and essay of poster art and popular film about Indian Muslims by filmmaker Yousuf Saeed.

What do you call a cricket fan who hurls racial insults at a player? the answer is, a nice middle class uncle-ji who is showing his true colors. This particular incident is from Bombay, and exactly the same thing had happened in Vadodara. At that time the explanation given by the chair of the BCCI was that the crowd was invoking Hanuman! This photograph taken by Getty Images photographer Hamish Blair certainly does not say Hanuman worship to me. Its just good old fashioned hate speech. I agree with Mukul Kesavan:

It’s silly and deluded to look for anthropological explanations that will turn racist behaviour by Indians into something subtly different. Cricket writing by Indians in English sometimes makes the mistake of thinking of the “average” Indian fan as non-English speaking and therefore naïve and unsophisticated. This assumption makes it possible for “us” to explain “their” behaviour away as a kind of unschooled brutishness that is unfortunate but not wicked. This is why Blair’s photograph is so important: it shows you upwardly mobile men - who probably discuss the virtues of one malt whisky over the other, who possibly holiday abroad, whose children certainly go to private schools that teach in English - using one of the many international codes they’ve learnt in their cosmopolitan lives, the Esperanto of bigotry. The mudras they’re making aren’t derived from Kathakali : they’re straight out of the international style guide to insulting black men.

There was a time when Vivian Richards was as well liked as Kapil Dev. What happened? Were we always like this-vis a vis our obsession for fair skin, and caste based discrimination. Or did our minds get re-colonized with the rise of potato chips and computer chips. Or did we forget that we used to have empathy with those who came from previously colonized countries. All of the above, none of the above?

The Guardian has an article by Priyamvada Gopal on the troubling tendency of Western liberals to see the fight for gender equality as an exclusive quality of Western civilization, with its corollary — its frequent invocation to justify dubious interventions in the name of saving Brown Women from Brown Men.

The article is a butchered version of the original — all the significant details have been taken out. Read the original underneath:

Read the rest of this entry »

After thinking about it for 22 years, a declaration on the rights of indigenous people was approved by the United Nations. Global Voices has a round up of all the blogs that have covered it. Sadly, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand have voted against it.

This American Life did a show back in June about Deception. The second story (24 minutes into the show) is about an upper middle class African American Lawyer who worked in a country club in Greenwich, Connecticut, as a bus boy. That was the only way they were going to admit him. Its a fascinating story in its horribleness. The funny thing is, its really hard to understand what era these people belong to, they sound so 19th century. Unfortunately, the reality is, its our own. And these people are hardly an exotic sub-species, they probably own everything and we can thank them for our lousy jobs.