[🇮🇳] I was told to ‘go back to Portugal’. Is this Indian modernity now?

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Date Occurred: Nov 16, 2024

I was told to ‘go back to Portugal’. Is this Indian modernity now?​

If my story is unique to me then it need not go any further. But I believe it is symptomatic of the mindsets that have grown not just across the country but also in families and neighbourhoods

Essential India with its philosophical openness would re-emerge from such cesspools of prejudice. (Express photo by Praveen Khanna)

Peter Ronald deSouza
Nov 16, 2024 16:18 IST

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The stories of discussions taking place in Resident Welfare Association (RWA) chat groups, University Alumni gatherings, the Officer’s mess, and even in IIT Whatsapp groups — where the scientific temper is supposedly pervasive — of members being trolled because of their religion and ethnicity, I only half regarded as serious. These to me were passing moments of toxicity. Essential India with its philosophical openness would re-emerge from such cesspools of prejudice. I have now learnt that I am mistaken. The poison has gone very deep. It has entered the groundwater of our national soul.

A few days ago, during an argument, I was told to “go back to Portugal”. Not one to take such abuse without a fight I responded and asked my adversary to “go back to Afghanistan”. He was outraged. “I’m not from Afghanistan,” he roared”. “Well, I’m not from Portugal,” I said. Two things come together in this brief exchange that are worth thinking about. My name and his outrage. For him I was obviously the outsider and, equally obviously, he was the insider. Both for him were self-evidently true. In this exchange, my argumentativeness faced his righteous anger. He said he was confronting me because I was evil. That we went to school together more than half a century ago did not matter.

(To be continued as screenshots, as the whole article is behind a pay wall ...)

 

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Open for discussion now.

Cheers, Doc

 

[Vsdoc]

On my part, I've been told to go back to Iran many times over the years.

By well known names and faces in the defence forum world too.

That of course is the milder version.

It goes all the way to ungratefulness

Opium trade on the corpses of dead brown starving natives

Colluding with the Brits

Being the Jews of India (note, in this narrative, Jews bad)

And finally ends (infallibly) with graphic sexual acts with Parsi girls done by virile Indian men to bolster our flagging numbers, thanks to the flagging members of Parsi men.

@PoKeMon

@Guru Dutt