INDIAN STUDENTS RACIALLY TREATED ABROAD

It’s the great Indian dream shattering. As I sit down to write this , I can see the bloodied eye of Sourabh Sharma , an Indian student studying hospitality, brutally bashed when six thugs confronted him in the train.

The sad part is this is not a one off incident. The number of Indian students assaulted and murdered is on the rise and yes, however non- chalant we try to be ….. fact is the situation is serious. Just consider the following incidents:



In the latest assault ( in Australia ), four students were attacked with a screwdriver by gatecrashers at a party in Hadfield, in Melbourne's north, on Saturday night. One victim, Sravan Kumar Theerthala, 24, remained in intensive care in Royal Melbourne Hospital the whole night. On Monday, Baljinder Singh, 25, a student, was stabbed in Carnegie as he walked alone at night. The attack left him in The Alfred hospital. In US on Nov 2008 Arpana Jinaga (24), student of MS at Seattle, was killed in the early hours (IST) of Saturday.The murder of Jinaga came close on the heels of a string of murders of NRIs from Andhra Pradesh.While A Srinivas, a PG medical student, Chandrasekhar Reddy Komma and Kiran Kumar Allam, both PhD students, were killed in 2007, T Soumya Reddy and her cousin Vikram Reddy were killed in September, 2008.

I am not here to present facts and figures. I just want to say a few things that has been disturbing me for the last couple of days.

First , the trend in Indian students to hide facts. Yes getting into a good foreign university is a tough job . But that does not mean that even if we are beaten there or laughed at we are going to keep quiet just because it may be looked upon as the shattering of the great Indian dream. Now that the Australia incident has happened many Indian students in Australia are coming forth to tell how they were ill treated. In the last three months in Australia 500 cases of assault on Indian students has been reported. I asked one of my relatives studying in US whether there is racism there. She replied “ No no , it does not happen in US . Its predominant in U.K”. When I asked one of my friends studying in U.K if that’s the truth he said that racism was a US phenomenon . I don’t believe that racism is country specific . I think it depends on a person’s mindset and how he has been brought up. Many people in the US still don’t like to eat in places that allow blacks to dine . My brother who stayed in Rotherham U.K for a year said that many English people used to call the Indian taxi drivers “ bloody Paki” . One of the factors which I think is very important to understand is that sometimes a growing sense of insecurity among natives can be wrongly looked upon as racism. Many natives in the US , UK and other countries feel that their jobs are under threat from the people of India and China . The recent recession has only aggravated the sentiment.

I would request all Indian people especially students to bring forth any cases of ill treatment that they have seen or received. Hiding facts ( or living in Alice in wonderland) won’t solve the problem.

Second thing that I would like to point out is the attitude of the authorities . An IIM Bangalore graduate Shishir was beaten up one and a half months ago by some people in U.K . Till now the police have not caught even a single culprit ( and we call the Indian police names!). The way the Australian police has acted ( or not acted) in the last few days has raised a lot of questions . A reporter of an Australian daily rightly asked “ Would the police be as slack if the students attacked were Americans ?” I think we all know the answer to that . Uncle Sam commands stricter action does it not? I think the Indian High Commission has to be more active in this regard.

An Australian blog writer called Indian students ‘smelly’ . I think if it were not for these smelly Indian students many foreign education institutes would have found it hard to sustain in these turbulent times. My project is on carbon nanotubes and the two teachers whose articles I follow most happen to be smelly Indians teaching at Purdue University. After all god has never been a racist and so everybody gets as much talent as they seek….skin color is never a constraint there.