PREJUDICE AGAINST INDIAN MEN FROM INDIA

PREJUDICE ESSAY
Communication Across Cultures
Lecturer: Ms. Gandhi
Divina Daryanani
JCU ID: 13261749
New Class 01

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Everyone has a different idea on what the actual meaning of prejudice is.
When they hear the word prejudice, they might think that we’re only talking about people’s skin colour or their race, whereas, it actually talks about many other things than just their skin colour or race. Prejudice generally describes one’s negative or unfair feeling towards gender, ethnicity, religion, culture, geographical background and many more. I recently discovered that I am, as a matter of fact, strongly prejudiced against indian people from India, focusing more on the men from India.
Not the multicultural Indian men who live overseas, just the ones born and brought up in India. There are a few reasons that explains why I’m prejudice against them. The reasons are as follows: it is because of their unendurable odor, their menacing stares, unjustifiable actions against women, their unhygienic way of living and their unfathomable way of bad-mouthing anything and everything. It took one trip which consisted of 15 days to confirm my prejudice against them.

It is unrealistic to not keep one’s self clean when it is of complete necessity to interact with other people on a daily basis. People around may think that if they have similar features of famous soccer players or actors, the odor won’t matter. But that’s where they go wrong. How? In several tests amongst college students, “girls consistently ranked ‘how a guy smells’ as the most important feature for determining whether or not she’d be sexually attracted to him. So in short, when it comes to initial attraction, how you smell is more important than your looks, abs, height, weight or even your income.” (Herz, 2014)

It was not long ago, last December 2014, when we (my family and I) went to
India for Christmas and New Years (despite it not being a country that celebrates

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these festivals) but the point was that we wanted to spend it with the dear ones there.
So it was planned for my trip to last for 15 days or so and we would stay with my father’s sister in their ostentatious mansion. To say that my father’s side of the family isn’t affluent would be an understatement of the century. It was a sunny afternoon and we decide to go out to get some Kulfi (a traditional Asian ice cream that contains nuts and has different flavours such as almond, orange, strawberry, etc) and these traditional dishes are sold on the road. We ordered and the best part was when the people around us had this unbearable odor. Don’t get me wrong, the people who were impecunious had this particular odor which was understandable as smelling good was not their first priority but subsequently the posh looking people had the very similar odor. It could most probably be that almost everyone had the same stench but it was horrible. Not everyone in Indonesia has this smell but they all did and it was most likely the worst thing I’ve ever encountered because it was horrendous.

To think that it was only their odor that was bad, they glared at me as if I was a wanted criminal. They looked at me as if I stole the Kulfi and hid somewhere in the corner consuming it. I do agree wholeheartedly that people have eyes and they have all the rights to look if they want to but in this case, they had their eyes set on me, not in a provocative way but instead in a mortiferous way. I thought these people would only do this on the roads but boy was I wrong. They just kept staring. Everywhere I went, whether it was in the mall or in a movie cinema, they would shoot their killer stares at me. I asked my aunt why and she just said they found me attractive because I don’t only look indian, it looks as if I’m a mix and not from India.

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One wouldn’t stare that long if they found someone attractive, they would try flirting or smiling but this wasn’t the case. Their stares were so bad, it looked as if they wanted to stab a knife into me or pounce on me to attack like a tiger or lion pounces on it’s prey. It didn’t just end there and it got to me as it was disturbing but again, knowing me, I didn’t do much about it but let it slide. A study by Giovanni B.
Caputo (2014) explained that “when people look into each other’s eye for a long period of time, they often experience symptoms of dissociation – including feelings of detachment from one’s body and from reality, along with, full- on hallucinations.”
This rather proved that a lot of people from India are like that. I came to a conclusion that people, especially the men, had some problem with their eyes.

Minority of the people stare for the heck of it but majority of the people, being men, stare in a loathsome way which has the capability to scare people away. Most of them stare because they have a bad motive behind it. The one word that practically describes these actions is ‘Rape’. According to Ejaz Khan (2015): Rape and Sexual violence is a massive problem in India. According to the National Crime Record
Bureau (NCRB), crimes against women have increased by 7.5% since 2010. The number of reported rapes in India, a country of over 1.2 billion people, has gone up to
33,707 in 2013 from 24,923 in 2012. The majority of rape victims are between 18 years and 30 years. About one out of three victims is below 18, and one in ten rape victims is under 14. In India, a woman is raped every 20 minutes. Dehli, being the capital city of India, is known as the Rape Capital. That should explain how bad the situation is. An incident occurred last year in Dehli, a 17 year old girl was raped in the park, just behind her house. The guy who raped her was a 30 year old man who was supposedly their school bus driver. The girl was raped multiple times, unconscious,

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bleeding, beaten up and abandoned there. She layed there, unable to move, until someone found her and rushed her to the emergency. That girl, Nayantara, was a childhood friend of mine who moved to India to do her bachelors in a reputable university. She didn’t recover from the gruesome incident as the rapist caused collateral damage to her internal organs. Ever since, I’ve been living in terror and I’m awfully traumatized by this incident because it can happen to anyone, and that, is what scares me the most.

“Sixty per cent of the "global total" who do not have access to toilets live in
India, and hence are forced to defecate in the open. In actual numbers, sixty per cent translates to 626 million. This makes India the number one country in the world where open defecation is practised.” (Prasad, 2012). This is not only true, I’ve witnessed this with my own two eyes. Everywhere, people are urinating away to glory, without giving two hoots about who’s around and watching. One evening, we were walking in the park and we could at least spot 5 men, all in 5 different locations, urinating publicly as if they owned the park. It is unlikely that you’ll find a lot of this in other countries so it was rather shocking and disturbing at the same time. I wondered if this actually did happen in other countries and majority of the people who I asked claimed that it is indeed unusual for a lot of the citizens to do that publicly. It is not only urinating that is a big issue there. Many other factors make
India a filthy country and it is awfully disgusting to live in such an unhygienic way because it can damage to one’s health. This just proves that India is, as a matter of fact, an obnoxious country.

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“Verbal abuse is the most common way to attempt to control the behavior, thoughts, and feelings of another human being. Controlling behaviors are designed to manipulate people into doing what the abuser wants them to do under the guise of love or respect or abject fear.” (Holly, 2012). Most of the time, when the Indians curse and you aren’t familiar with the language, they can call you unimaginable words. Consequently, for people who are from there, they just never stop with the remarks. I do agree that to guys, looks do matter, but it is also the personality that matters. Most of the time, the unattractive girls with a beautiful personality are put down and the attractive ones with lousy personalities are looked up to. This is some theory that I do not quite understand, since the start, it just does not make sense.

The time I was in India and at a party, my cousin introduced me to his friends and the first thing they did, was eye me from top to bottom. It was already pretty clear that they were judging me left, right and centre. At that point of time, I had no interest in making any conversation with them so I politely excused myself and walked away to talk to other people who I was familiar with but at the same time, I witnessed the same thing happening across the room. Not only were they staring, the guys were laughing and mumbling some things about her in the language she clearly didn’t understand and all she did was look down and accept that she was being bad-mouthed by them. I thought I was the only one being critized at that time but then I noticed this happens a lot. I do not understand what they get out of it because it’s not a very good thing and it portrays a very bad image to the society.

So, in conclusion, I believe that people in India, men particularly, are the most insensitive people I’ve ever come across. They only think about themselves without

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considering what other people feel and what they go through. It is not okay for these men to continue doing the things they do because it emotionally, mentally and physically breaks people down. Why would someone want to live in a country like
India, knowing that anything can happen to them? Why not change and become a better person? What do they have to gain from doing all this? Nothing. They do not gain anything from being the way they are and if they improve to become better, it will make India an amazing place for everyone to live in. That’s something I live to see. 7

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Reference List:
Gupto, G. B. (2014, April 7). Dissociation and hallucinations in dyads engaged through interpersonal gazing. Retrieved July 29, 2014, from psy-journal: http://www.psy-journal.com/article/S0165-1781(15)003212/abstract
Herz, R. (2014, January 20). The Science of Scent and Attraction.
Retrieved February 2, 2015 from askmen: http://www.askmen.com/scent/scent_300/313_the-science-behind-scentattraction.html Holly, K. (2012, July 30). Abuse Community. Retrieved January 14, 2014 from Healthy Place: http://www.healthyplace.com/abuse/verbalabuse/verbally-abusive-men-and-women-why-do-they-abuse/
Khan, E. (2015, January n.d). Top 10 Countries With Maximum.
Retrieved from Wonderlist: http://www.wonderslist.com/top-10countries-with-maximum-rape-crimes/
Prasad, R. (2012, June 15). India Is Drowning In Its Own Excreta.
Retrieved January 20, 2013, from The Hindu: http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/health/policy-and-issues/india-isdrowning-in-its-own-excreta/article3524150.ece