A Brief Encounter With Racism

As I said on Wednesday I will ramble about something that happened to me. And here it goes

I was sitting in Vaishali, a popular college hangout joint in Pune. Not the place that I usually go to (I prefer its sister restaurant Roopali where the oldies hang out drink coffee and leave 50ps tips in this day and age) but the Ratnakar was keen to do the Vaishali number. The bong was back in india after a hiatus of 8 years and understably he wanted to go to the places which were cool and hip in our college days and which we never had the money to patronise back then.
The Bong's nostalgia lane walk also included catching up with guys we had been to college with and so we met an old pal of ours at Vaishali. Things were fine for a bit with conversation centering around the usual 'Whats up. It's been a long time. Any kids' stuff.
And then pretty much as we do when we meet an Indian we live abroad we started talking about hooliganism and crime in the west (never mind the seven banks robbed in a month in Bombay). It was at this point that Ratnakar said that even India seemed to be getting more violent what with the murder of Vikram Poddar on the Pune-Bombay highway.
I mumbled something about how Hinjewadi is a remote place and unsafe. What happened next caught Ratnakar completely off-guard and left me mildly amused. The friend we were meeting was a Maharashtrian and he tool umbrage at my pronounciation of Hinjewadi and here's how the conversation went.
Him: It's not hinjewadi is hinjuvdi. All these outsiders are screwing the language
Me: I don't give a fuck. I will pronounce it how I want
Him: Just say Hinjuvdi
Me: Hinjewadi. I say Bombay, Madras, Calcutta so big deal
Him: why can't you say Hinjuvdi
Me: I will say what I want
At this point Ratnakar, who looked distinctly perturbed managed to change the conversation.

It's interesting. The three of us have all grown up in Pune. I am Tam, Ratnakar is Bong and this guy is Maharashtrian. I speak Marathi fluently, I have probably read more Marathi literature (in translation) perhaps than my friend and I have plenty of Maharashtrian friends and yet I am an outsider. I mean in our teenage years we probably laughed at guys who were obsessed with regional biases and spoke passionately about all men being equal and yet...
There seems to be a rising sentiment in Pune against the northeners and the southerners and the easterners (outsiders in their own country) who have come in large numbers thanks to the IT boom. I even heard another friend say that the number of beggars in Pune has increase and most of the beggars are not Maharashtrian but from Bihar and UP. I have long stopped trying to argue because you never win these.

Ratnakar was horrified that people we grew up up with and talked passionately against regionalism and caste seem to have metamorphosed into a different animal. Me, I am not surprised. We are in all probability the most racist people. Don't trust a gujju, bongs are political, mallus are clannish, punjabis are shift thats all we say every now and again. I personally learnt that both regionalism and caste never go away when everytime I met someone they heard my name and said you are a Tam Brahm. Tam I can understand but Brahmin now why is that important.