Desi Manifesto Blog: The Forum for South Asian American Men

Terrible couple of weeks for large swaths of Asia, from the South to the East to the Southeast. Whether it was Cyclone Nargis bludgeoning Burma (though perhaps the ruling military junta’s indignant stance is the greater tragedy as her people suffer), the 7.9 magnitude quake in central China, or the terrorist attacks in Jaipur, India, this has been a devastating and shitty month for the most populous regions of the world.

Sometimes I feel resigned to the cycle. If Buddha and the Gita had it right, life is just suffering. Is this an un-Disney circle of life? Maybe this is just how things go, and will we ever change anything unless we change everything? And what new problems will those changes bring?

As an Indian man living in Louisiana for many years, I have often been asked, by members of all races, what my thoughts on Bobby Jindal are. I tend to hate answering such questions because I often feel doing so plays into the notion that there exists some monolithic Indian-American voting bloc. What I think of Jindal has little to do with my being Indian. What I think of him is really based on that one universal question that all responsible citizens should ask themselves when deciding between political candidates: Where does he stand on the issues that I care deeply about?

I was not Christian, I was not white. This alone was enough to invalidate any chance of being president… [But in] this new millennium, in this present day, things have changed. We finally have a South Asian candidate running for president – Barack Obama.

Before you point out the obvious, allow me to explain.

And by “we,” I mean Indians, and that includes the Scrabulous brothers, Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla. We finally got caught ripping off other people’s ideas and using them as our own. And I can say that it’s about time, and I’m not all that sorry to hear it.

We were also invaded by a couple different groups throughout history, and on the whole, we’ve been stepped on because of our race, deemed to be inferior to the invading stock. I believe we’ve proven otherwise. But if we’re so stupid that we then turn around and do the same to another race in our very position, I feel we’re only proving that we may indeed lack mentally. At the very least, we’re not learning from history.

Sure, the news in general is skewed towards the twisted aspects of daily life as opposed to the righteous and uplifting. But that’s even more exaggerated regarding Muslims in American media. This is the one article I’ve read in many months that portrays Muslims in a positive light. That’s about a 25-to-1 ratio.

Do you honestly believe there are 25 atrocities committed by Muslims for every one virtuous act? I do not.

Various cultures have tried isolating those who are “different.” They’ve all claimed it was for benign purposes, some going so far as to say it was to benefit the minority group. In recent history, the Nazis made the Jews wear “pieces of flair” (thanks, Office Space). The Americans sent anyone of Japanese origin into camps during WW2. The Taliban made the Afghani Hindus wear patches. The Americans made blacks live in separate areas of the country when they tried the “separate but equal” debacle. Rather than protecting the smaller group’s members, these plans simply divide them from the majority, destroy the bonds that have integrated them into society, and make it easier for the majority to view the smaller group as a foreign entity, a “them” vs. “us” scenario.