nonthaburi

Stumbled across this because of something in another thread. It's a bit out of date but it's quite interesting. So how do you perceive Indians and yourself?

http://blog.cygopinath.com/gopificat...-indian-first/

Bipat

I don't know which made me more irritated. The question "how do you perceive Indians" or the fact that my Indian dongle packed in just as I typed an answer.

What is an "Indian"? there are a billion of them are they identical 'clones'?

There will be bad, good, evil, saintly and mostly ordinary just like any other nationality.

As a British female married for 45 years to an Indian person, with all our Indian relatives in India, and living with them part of every year, I see them as just 'people'. With the same ambitions for their children, their lives as British people. The same worries, fears etc. etc. as any other people.

nonthaburi

Sorry if I irritated you!

Perhaps I should have worded the question in a more objective way so that it wasn't taken the wrong way. So, how do you think Indians are perceived by others around the world?

To put this in perspective, I was talking with an Egyptian colleague the other day, about Indians. He was saying how all round the world Indians are thought to be clever people and the country has a lot of power ( nuclear bomb etc). However in Saudi where we both are, they are thought of as nothing but indentured slaves to be worked.

Bipat

I would have thought that anyone with any general knowledge would know that as in all nationalities there are different classes of society.
From Nobel prize winning academics, top industrialists to the poor who go to Saudi to earn a 'crust'.

nonthaburi

Obviously, but that is part of my point about perception.

Perception and reality are often not the same thing.

Bipat

Not the perception in the UK, (leaving out the BNP etc.) so many Indian origin people in top university posts/ medics/lawyers/saviours of companies!!!. Certainly not USA where so many CEOs and academics are of Indian origin. A dentist relative recently gone to Australia for a few years seems quite happy.

(I sometimes think British expats are not representative of the general public, I was amazed at some of the views when I accidently discovered the Goa forum a few years ago. Maybe this is where the young poster on the Goa thread is getting his ideas from?)

Are Expats the new colonialists? That is just making use of a country for their own ends.
That is a controversial question?

nonthaburi

No, I agree with you. There is a well known Thai forum that any expat would know, and after a quick trawl through some of the posts you would be wondering why some of these people stay there when they seem to hate Thais and Thailand so much.

I wouldn't say that there is a new colonialism on a local level because most expats don't have any real power ( in voting, controlling government, land rights etc), compared to the locals who will almost always win in a dispute. Also, expats are generally giving inwards to the economy financially whereas colonialists were taking out.

What they do have though, is an economic power, coming from a Western country with wages and pensions that are far larger than the vast majority of the locals ( in Asia anyway). So in this sense you could say that they are making use of the country for their own ends because it affords them a cheap retirement. That doesn't mean that you have to treat the locals badly in the process though. Guess that comes down to the individual.

One thing I noticed from my time in Thailand was, when listening to someone's views about the locals and the country, to bear in mind where they had spent the majority of their time in country and the types of people they had been mixing with. This made an awful lot of difference to their perceptions of that country.

a_f_d

As one of the poor who went to to Saudi to earn a 'crust' I can tell you that Indians are not treated as a special case; all non-Saudis are treated as indentured labour- only the type of work and the wages differ by nationality: America at the top, Britain and Philipines next and Indian sub-continent, Yemen and Ethiopia at the bottom.

AndyD 8-)₹