The White Woman!

I’m adding some pictures from my South India trip. Browsing through them I’m realizing we packed in so much during our seven day tour. I’m pretty impressed with what *Stephanie and I got done. Considering neither of us spoke Tamil, Malayalam nor Kannada, we got by pretty smoothly.

It was tough getting around as a lot of the locals spoke heavy-accented (I’m not going to say Indian-accented because it was drastically different from the Indian accent most are familiar with) broken or zero English. Sometimes, as a last resort, I’d ask people if they spoke Hindi, which one of my South Indian friends had already warned me against, and they’d either get offended or laugh as if it was the most absurd question they’d ever heard in their life.

I felt bad for Stephanie; her tall height, white skin and auburn hair got her a lot of unwanted attention despite her dressing in Indian clothes to try and blend in. A lot of Indians asked to get pictures taken with her, a few times she kindly obliged. The men would just gawk and some had no shame in holding their cell phone to her face and take a good shot of the “white girl.”

Calpetta was the worst. We sat down at this restaurant and the men there kept gawking at us, so the waiter moved us over to the ‘family area.’ We sat down next to a family which included a little girl of about three years of age. The innocent girl instantly pointed at Stephanie and began crying! She was horrified by Steph, terror was written all over her face. Of course we didn’t blame the toddler, maybe it was the first time she’d seen someone who was of white skin colour. But her father felt bad and scolded his daughter. It took her a good ten minutes to quiet down.

Stephanie told me she was used to such things here. I don't think everyone can be so thick-skinned. She’s doing her NGO internship in Anand, Gujarat and people there give her extra attention all the time. Along with the photo-snapping, she’s had people point at the freckles on her face and arms, and ask her what type of skin disease she was suffering from!

I’m so thankful to be living in a multicultural country (or maybe I should say multicultural region since there's a lot of segregation in certain parts of Canada as well). Thanks to my exposure, I hadn’t even noticed Stephanie’s many freckles until she pointed them out to me.

I’m glad Steph took the opportunity to challenge herself in India. She doesn’t have any Indian friends back in Holland and can’t recall there even being any where she grew up. She too has her own stereotypes to break free from. When we were in Kochi, for instance, she loudly yelled out to someone, “Hey! That man’s stealing from your bag!” and accusingly pointed at the culprit. I was so embarrassed. All she could see was an Indian thief sneaking stuff out of a white woman’s backpack. But in reality, the “thief” was the European woman’s boyfriend, who happened to be an NRI. Maybe she wasn't used to seeing interracial couples. Steph apologized but the guy was still pretty insulted, I think he swore something under his breath.

So there's racism and cultural stereotypes everywhere. When I'm in Canada for instance no one asks me about my Canadian background. They usually ask me about India and Hinduism and holy cows; but I'm not a scholar in any of those subjects. How nice it would be if everyone were more exposed to varied cultures and took the time to see things from the point of view of others.