one of my close friends recently 'encountered' a firang lady. i use the word firang deliberately. The incident involved the lady telling my friend and some other people how her wallet was pickpocketed. The mishap is fairly commonplace. Her discomfort was due to the fact that "of all the people....an AMERICAN stole her wallet!!!!" and her discomfort eventually became everybody else's toothache beacuse she just would not stop iterating the fact that it was " of all the people.....an AMERICAN!" the implications were clear. She woulnt have been surprised if the thief would have been Indian. Perhaps this is due to the fact that she is in India and hence an indigenious craftsman would have been more easily placed in the scenario. But this IS also, i feel, due to the remains of the white man's supiriority complex which peeps out of some keyholes sometimes.
The most vivid memory of such an experience personally is of the time when i happened to meet an American student, studying in the US to become a missionary, who had come to india with his yet new-girlfriend. Perhaps as a way of being faithful to his idea of 'grace' or because of his new girlfriend....the guy ended up paying more than twice the usual fare of rickshaw. The rickshaw-wallah and me both had yet bigger surprises in store . The rickshaw-wallah was stoned for a couple of seconds, as the guy blurted out heavily accented hindi and i was irritated out of my wits as i tried to explain to him that this 'geasture' actually would not transform him for life and what he really needed was education and counselling to make him understand the imporatnce of money and inturn education but he just kept on telling me how I didnt know what conditions these poeple lived in and how they needed money to send their kids to school.
'Grace' is what he called it and ignorant contentment of apparently changing the world is what i still refer to it as. My arguments of his 'gesture' ruining the everyday travelling expense dynamics of other middle class and lower midlle class people who had to tavel by richshaws everyday but couldnt afford paying double the prices...also didnt strike him as important as the 'gesture' of 'grace'.
Well so much so for the changing face of the world....universal brothethood and all that jazz.....but hey jazz was black also..........so there you go!