PSA: Brown people are messed up too

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So, it turns out that the guy who walked into Montreal’s Dawson College and opened fire, killing one person and wounding 19 others, was Indian. You can bet that across the country, Indian aunties are saying, “Can you imagine? A nice Indian boy doing something like that!”

It’s not as though Indians are exempt from social phenomena present in the populace – how could we be, really – but a lot of us still prefer to think that we are somehow different. It’s as though certain things – infidelity, divorce, homosexuality, addiction, mental illness, murder – are somehow inherently non-Indian things that really have nothing to do with us.

We’ve all seen that bit in Bend it like Beckham where Parminder Nagra’s friend tells her that he really likes Beckham – and she goggles, sputtering, “But you’re Indian!” She’s entirely supportive of him afterwards, but there’s still that first moment of doubt when she’s all, dude, you can’t be gay, you’re Indian. And we – the Indian members of the audience – are laughing as much at her as we are at ourselves, because we too were staring and thinking, “How can he be gay? He’s a nice Indian boy!”

It’s not just Indians that do this, but South Asians in general. For example, my current family doctor, a Sri Lankan Tamil, whose practice consists mostly of Tamils, asked my mum which hospital she worked at, so she could look into referring people there. Mum obligingly tells her, adding the doctors there mostly do family medicine and addiction medicine. The doctor immediately loses interest, saying, well, our people don’t really do that stuff, do they?

Huh?

Newsflash, people. Us Indians are the same as the rest of the Canadian populace – we’re just as frelled-up, fracked-up, fucked-up – Kimveer Gill being a case in point – and we fall in love regardless of gender and we have things we can’t bring ourselves to stop doing and we see things that aren’t real and we cheat on our spouses and we leave them and you know what?

We’re not special. That nice Indian boy (or girl) doesn’t exist. Quit the illusion, take the red pill and look at reality.