HELLO JI!

A WORD (OR TWO HUNDRED) FROM THE EDITOR

If you’ve been taught that you’re safe only in a certain circle, then how do you get to know those outside the circle enough to understand and love them? Image credit: CLEYDER DUQUE on Pexels.

Harsh, in-your-face racism is, sadly, a lived reality for many. And then there’s othering, that comes wearing a benign face. When the words are friendly, but leave you out in the cold.

In his book One Game At A Time, this month’s Grant’s Desi Achiever Harnarayan Singh writes about the door-to-door salesman who said, “Oh, and I just wanted to say – welcome to Canada!” as he walked away. It hurt to hear him say that, and it took me a minute to process why...That guy only thought I was a newcomer because of how I looked.

Singh’s great-grandfather Chanda Singh was one of the first 100 Sikhs to enter the country and his family has been here for over a 100 years.

A young man recalls being thanked by a lady for helping her sort out an issue with a sales receipt while he was working a summer retail job.

“You people are so good with math!” she said. “We people?” he asks. “I was born in Mississauga!”

But all this talk of being othered has me wondering if we other ourselves, too. Do we hold ourselves in silos, excluding people from our inner circles?

In Breaking the Ocean, Annahid Dashtgard wrote of the immigrant experience through the lens of a child of mixed race, of “the consistent uncertainty about whether you’re in or out, as if belonging is an invisible skipping rope one is forever jumping over, from one situation to the next”.

I am reminded of Markham City councillor Jo Li, born in India to parents of Chinese descent, who had said in an interview with Desi News that he was not Chinese enough for the Chinese community in Canada and not Indian enough for the Indian community in Canada.

Take Indian Matchmaking. Except for one woman, the others in the show had only desi friends. These are girls who grew up in America, went to school there. I know I risk a rap on the knuckles: Aha! so you think desis aren’t American? Of course they are, but surely the girls interacted with other ethnicities? So how come they weren’t friends with them?

Take Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jaenge (1995). Both Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol travel to Europe with a bunch of buddies, again, all desi. Yes, it was just a movie that was set in the UK and Indian Matchmaking is a reality show set in the US, but I suspect it’s not so different here in Canada. We’re so full of “brown people” this and “gora” that. I recall another young man saying his female cousins – born and raised in Canada – never invited a single non-desi friend home and nor did they ever visit one.

What happens to these young people when they enter the real world? If you’ve been taught that you’re safe only in a certain circle, then how do you get to know those outside the circle enough to understand and love them?

We never know what riches lie in store for us until we open ourselves up to the joy of discovering new friendships.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Shagorika Easwar