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Comment by rainhacker | Hacker News Reader

We never went to malls as everything there was out of my budget. I was also afraid that they would throw us out because we couldn’t speak English

Reading this breaks my heart. In a few weeks India beings an year-long celebration to mark the country’s 75th Independence Day. And yet people feel discriminated because the don’t speak English.

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It is not just English. Traditional clothes are also frowned upon. A few years there was a case of a man not being let into a mall because he was wearing a Dhoti(A traditional Indian men's wear, prevalent in some parts of the country.) But the irony was he had to argue in English to be let in.

And something I heard years back. Kids were not allowed into another school where a competition was being held. Why...because they were in dhotis and not in uniform. The only problem, that was their school uniform.

Isn't just the language or clothes. People feel inferior/discriminated to eat with their hand (traditional Indian food) as opposed to using forks / knifes, which somehow is supposed to be "civilized". People feel that even when they speak English, their Indian accent is somehow bad / funny. Its not uncommon for people (specially from the western world) to make judgements how Indian/Asian food smells/tastes bad. Wonder how much of these stem from the colonial past of systematically being subjugated and being told you're inferior for 100s of years.

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