Curry Bashing v/s “Teri Ma Ki….”

The growing and rabid racism being practiced globally and with more recent emphasis to Australia is becoming a cause for concern. India has been a tolerant nation, with an all are welcome attitude, having friendly people to help foreigners feel at ease when they come as tourists or on professional assignments. The culture of “atithi devo bhava” where the guest is akin to God is well known and has been ingrained in the Indian psyche. The fact that more and more foreigners are making India their homes and marrying into Indian families and staying back here is proof of the fact that India does assimilate and absorb other cultures like a sponge. Travel to Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Gurgaon, Delhi and Kolkatta and you will see the increase in the number of foreigners in this country – I wonder what would happen if we decide to segregate the Australians and start giving them a bad time as is currently happening in Australia.

We need to do a bit of historical research on the Australians to try and understand why they are so aggressive and sometimes downright boorish and in extreme cases criminal in their behavior. Below is a brief history of Australia from it’s official website, which will help in analyzing their behavior.

Britain arrives and brings its convicts
A number of European explorers sailed the coast of Australia, then known as New Holland, in the 17th century. However it wasn’t until 1770 that Captain James Cook chartered the east coast and claimed it for Britain. The new outpost was put to use as a penal colony and on 26 January 1788, the First Fleet of 11 ships carrying 1,500 people – half of them convicts – arrived in Sydney Harbour. Until penal transportation ended in 1868, 160,000 men and women came to Australia as convicts. While free settlers began to flow in from the early 1790s, life for prisoners was harsh. Women were outnumbered five to one and lived under constant threat of sexual exploitation. Male re-offenders were brutally flogged and could be hung for crimes as petty as stealing. The Aboriginal people displaced by the new settlement suffered even more. The dispossession of land and illness and death from introduced diseases disrupted traditional lifestyles and practices.
By the 1820s, many soldiers, officers and emancipated convicts had turned land they received from the government into flourishing farms. News of Australia’s cheap land and bountiful work was bringing more and more boatloads of adventurous migrants from Britain. Settlers or ‘squatters’ began to move deeper into Aboriginal territories – often with a gun - in search of pasture and water for their stock. In 1825, a party of soldiers and convicts settled in the territory of the Yuggera people, close to modern-day Brisbane. Perth was settled by English gentlemen in 1829, and 1835 a squatter sailed to Port Phillip Bay and chose the location for Melbourne. At the same time a private British company, proud to have no convict links, settled Adelaide in South Australia.
Gold was discovered in New South Wales and central Victoria in 1851, luring thousands of young men and some adventurous young women from the colonies. They were joined by boat loads of prospectors from China and a chaotic carnival of entertainers, publicans, illicit liquor-sellers, prostitutes and quacks from across the world. In Victoria, the British governor’s attempts to impose order - a monthly licence and heavy-handed troopers - led to the bloody anti-authoritarian struggle of the Eureka stockade in 1854. Despite the violence on the goldfields, the wealth from gold and wool brought immense investment to Melbourne and Sydney and by the 1880s they were stylish modern cities.
Australia’s six states became a nation under a single constitution on 1 January 1901. One of the new national parliament’s first acts was to pass legislation, later known as the White Australia Policy, restricting migration to people of primarily European origin. This was dismantled progressively after the Second World War and today Australia is home to people from more than 200 countries.

After reading the brief history of Australia, you will realize that the gene stock of the current crop of Australians is poor – they are basically a violent people because their ancestors were history sheeters, banished from England to the penal colonies in Australia. Even when it comes to cricket or any other sport, the Australians are loud, rude and downright obnoxious and they call it sporting aggression! The abusive language may be a sporting event in Aussie families but in Asia it is considered uncouth. The fact that Harbhajan Singh and Dhoni’s men got under the Aussie skin and beat them at their own game in their own country must have rankled for Symonds to abuse our cricketers – the trouble is these bunch of jokers turned out to be a bunch of sissies when they got their own back in the form of “teri ma ki….” and the Indian cricket team became racist. Wowee!! isn’t that something.... we were branded racists by the people who invented the term! What is all this bashing up and burning of the Indian and Indian property in Australia – the cops are calling it random acts by hooligans – looks like they cannot stomach being called racists… well they are you see…. AUSSIES are RACISTS…so there, it’s done with! Now what?

Is the Indian government going to intervene and make it a big issue? Are the Indians in Australia going to get together and come out on the streets to demand justice? Or are we just going to pretend to be Gandhians and get trampled over repeatedly? The way to do it would be to protest in Gandhian fashion, for one we could stop consuming anything Australian, stop touring that country, why go there for education? The Aussies like the color of the money being brought in by the tens of thousands of Indian students but they do not like the color of their skin….interesting isn’t it. The best way to show this ex-colony of convicts is by boycotting anything Australian!