=>”ah why are you drawing attention to your pale skin! as they’ve accused you of doing”

The crazy thing was that I never referred to myself at all but was just clarifying some misconceptions some people there appeared to have about the physical appearance of certain northwest-Indian/Asian groups, at least with regards to those of us in the UK. There have been other commenters there who have been a little triumphalist and insensitive about being light-skinned, but I’ve never been one of them. It’s guilt-by-association.

=>”oh and referring to Punjabis as Latin-looking – hmm they didn’t like that did they!”

Well I was talking about many British Asians as a whole but obviously it applies in particular to many Punjabis here (from both sides of the border). The hypersensitivity is quite curious; I don’t know if it’s jealousy, some kind of inferiority-complex, or just attempts at overcompensating for what they perceive to be the colour-obsession within desi society and the prejudice within wider American culture. Maybe a bit of both. There’s certainly a lot of reverse-racism going on, both against lighter-skinned/sharper-featured North Indians and against white people too. Good-looking dark Asian women are glorified, but God help anyone who indicates an appreciation for a good-looking Asian girl who also happens to be very light-skinned; some people have gone berserk in the case of the latter.

Weirder still, the vast majority of the time I’ve actually been talking about facial features, not skin-colour, but it’s interesting how some of them are so preoccupied with colour-based racial notions that they immediately assume it to be the latter. Personally I think that the whole self-conscious “brown” thing that appears to be going on in some quarters over there doesn’t help matters either. To use the American term, I think they’re ‘fetishizing’ brown skin a little too much, and in some cases are trying to turn the tables by promoting lighter colouring as something to recoil from.

This behaviour appears to be particularly pronounced amongst some (not all) commenters who are at the darker end of the spectrum themselves. There’s a hell of a lot of paranoia going on.

I guess the fact that the desi population over there is disproportionately composed of “recent arrivals” from the subcontinent (with the associated prejudices and baggage) and, especially, the fact that unlike the UK there are far more people who are from regions which (on average) tend to be considerably darker, may have a great deal to do with it. As a result of this, what is rapidly becoming very clear to me is the fact that British Asian culture and US-Asian culture are diverging in some aspects and that the evolution they’re taking is heading in a different direction to what’s happened here in the UK. A large number of them are thinking and behaving in quite a different way to us, and it’s significantly due to their apparently-different physical appearance and their different “original” regional/religious cultures.

Anyway, as I said before, I think this is mostly a reflection of some of the commenters on that blog and is not due to anything negative about the people running the website itself, who mostly tend to be a pretty decent bunch. However, lately I have been feeling very “British” (or, perhaps more accurately, “British Asian”) when commenting there due to the cultural differences which are becoming very clear, and the negative experiences I’ve had at the hands of some of their more neurotic and belligerent participants have played a significant part in this.

May i finally state that one of my ambitions is to kick a bishop up the arse.

Nice to have you back. I’m glad to hear you enjoyed your trip to the muthaland.

=>”my pale complexion you see”

Just as an aside, you’d get lynched for saying that on a certain American desi group discussion blog I frequent (and you occasionally visit). Some of our North American cousins appear to be more than a little touchy about such matters

Yes I am speaking from personal experience, as you probably know…

As for The Producers, the first time I saw it was with my Catholic in-laws. Though fond of me, they obviously thought I was a little ‘different’. When the ‘Springtime for Hitler’ number started, I laughed till the tears ran down my face, as did my husband. We turned to look at his parents, and their faces were the replicas of the audience on the screen.

Secondly there is the whole ‘associated with the job’ issue. There is definitely some kind of moral right to privacy that is broken if someone pokes around in your private life and tells your wife, or your boss, what you do for fun.

Ralph is turning a genocide into a religion. Father is a religious term as God is called father and catholic priests are called father. Is he turning Hitler into an important figure in the Jewish faith and saying ridiculing him is blasphemous?

He is obviously not a fan of The Producers a comedy in which Zero Mostel casts a hippy to play Hitler. I thought Jews had a sense of humour and face it after 2 thousand years of persecution they have certainly needed one.

HAHAHAHA!

Haha!

Heh. Though I find its a lot nicer to give people the benefit of doubt. Coming back from India, I find that I still love that country immensely and speak Hindi so fluently that people were completely caught unawares (my pale complexion you see), so I could say that India is also a home away from home (Britain) which would annoy the likes of Catholic even more. But what do I care?

Similarly a fair percentage of people who criticise Islamic hotheads are probably Islamaphobic.

Sunny – though we are British, damn it, I’ve got the birth certificate and passport to prove it, it doesn’t mean that a fair percentage of them don’t agree. And just because I’m paranoid, it doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to be paranoid about.