Threading the Needle

For Indians

Hello.

We have REFRAINED thus far from getting too into the weeds on the whole Indian thing. Four years in and we do not want to start talking about being Indian now. And I’m sure you all have APPRECIATED our RESTRAINT!!!! I do NOT want to comment on recent goings-on, but it seems…I MUST. 1) because Dua Lipa is now engaged, and 2) because of this Vivek tweet.

This is one of the most cringe-inducing and psychologically transparent things I’ve ever seen. It brings me no pleasure to reproduce it here, let alone look at it more than I have to. For years I have lamented the fact that this mf is one of ours—why couldn’t he be Korean or something? Consider the number of large-scale, unbelievably consequential problems staring down the world—genocide, climate change, impending pandemics—and one of the guys whose hand is at the wheel is making a big show of saying we need more movies like Whiplash. This is what happens when a dude was called Kevin G one too many times in high school. The logical endpoint of empowering the Indian man’s innate belief that he has something worthwhile to say, and that the manner in which he writes is pleasurable, and good, and keep doing it, bro! You’re so good at writing! It’s awesome!

This is where we’ve ended up. A truly remarkable text, both in how much it reveals about my man’s psyche and in what it can tell us about being Indian today. I read the whole thing like this:

Indians weren’t meant to be in the news/talked about this much. We’re meant to be a silent, unremarkable mass of humans. It annoys me that people are saying insane, offensive things about Indians online, because only I should be able to say insane, offensive things about Indians, and besides, they’re doing it from the wrong, right-wing stance; I’m doing it from the correct, left-wing position. I’m being racist in the right way (internalized), they’re doing it in a way that makes me feel icky (even though we’re kind of saying the same things at points).

Here are the many things that can be and are true about this current discourse about Indians and H-1B visas and Sriram Krishnan or whoever the fuck:

• V*vek is one corny ass freak. He has always been and will always be a scammer, and he represents a specific type of ambitious, overachieving Indian—many of whom walk among us to this very day—one that attaches himself to the prevailing access routes to capital and clout and with no principles whatsoever. It’s taken much patience and empathy to not publicly comment on his hairline here, and that’s mostly because 1) knock on wood and 2) we may get sued.

• Indians, as the most economically successful minority in the US, have been on a sharp ascent to near-assimilation—we have been able to align ourselves with elite cultural institutions across the country, and only now, with Trump’s re-election, are we groping at the halls of electoral power with our grubby little hands. V*vek, Kash Patel, Usha Vance, now this Sriram mf—we are useful idiots for the conservative project. It was only a matter of time.

lol

• El*n/All-In Podcast/A16Z crowd planted their flag as the technocrat right powering Trump to reelection, and with them, they have brought along hundreds of thousands of Indian guys who work on H-1B visas at FAANG companies while making those guys hella rich, and staked out “Indians” as “the good ones” in their war against “migrants” because they need them to keep writing code on the cheap. On one hand, there is some schadenfreude in watching them have to defend various Indian guys because they’ve “been a US citizen for over a decade” and be (rightly) exposed for their hypocrisy. On the other hand, these are the people in power now. These are our kings.

• The problem is that this butts up against genuine ethno-nationalist sentiment in the Trump base because we cannot and will never be white, no matter how much I want to be. I fucking love white people pleasseeeee let me be white I WANT IT!! WHITE!!!!!!

• I’m doing a lot of that “can be and are” or “cannot and will never be” type of phrase construction today

• We are in real danger of exporting the rise of Hindu nationalist politics in India to the US, and these mfs are facilitating it

• Not much to say about El*n other than: this video is absolutely haunting. I legit have watched it once or twice a month since I first saw it. Like watching a car crash, slow motion, etc. Impossible to imagine a guy less cool and with his finger further away from the pulse:

• Many people on the internet say insanely racist shit about India, which only I’m allowed to do. So many instances of a white guy posting an edited video of like dudes rolling around in cow shit or something and claiming it’s indicative of a backwards culture—hey, you guys should try it some time then!! It really cools you down.

• But also, Indian people can generally suck. If you are looking for dudes to grind away developing obscene military tech at Anduril without any sense of moral hesitancy, we are your guys!!!! Imagine being a guy named @indian_bronson on Twitter and constantly talking about birth rates and pseudo-eugenics—we are the best!!!!!

Great Freudian slip here with “of”—we’re racist af!

• The Vivek tweet evinces the core sadness of all this emphasis on Indians as “skilled immigrants” (the implication being that other minorities do not provide a useful “skill,” and that, in turn, disqualifies them for participation in this country): that Indians are defined by (and define themselves by!) their ability to produce and maintain capital in the tech industry. Ruthless careerism masquerading as harmless techno-optimism. “More creating, less ‘chillin,’” as a guy I know once said. This fucking sucks.

Amidst all of this, it can be difficult, if you are Indian and trying to figure out your personality, to know where to situate yourself. Thankfully, I have developed a handy toolkit to becoming the perfect, secret third thing: an unbelievably sexy hot attractive chill guy with a robust hairline, an ability to metabolize carbs past the age of 18, perfect politics, and a craven need for approval from both white people and fellow Indians—while also being self-aware and annoying about it! This is how you thread the needle and be a type of Indian everyone can get onboard with:

Just be chill

Don’t like make a stink and talk and stuff. Just be kinda chill with it and don’t say much. If you’re in a conversation and a joke comes to mind, maybe take a deep breath and think twice before committing—sometimes, all you need is that one second of self-censoring.

Do not share your passions or interests with anyone

Keep that stuff to yourself. Better if we’re just an amorphous blob, I think—no rough edges, nothing that sticks, no pain points for white people to hang onto. So try to neuter yourself as an individual.

Provide some utility—whether it be social, economic, etc.—to one white family that might be on the fence about other races

One of the best things you can be is “one of the good ones.” Imagine you’re the kindly doctor with a great bedside manner that cured a white family’s patriarch’s cancer, and because of that, they always stop and think about you when they’re convinced immigration is ruining the pure white blood of this country. Or you defer to white people in all public spaces, like letting them cut you in line at the grocery store or always smiling no matter what when they walk by you, even if you’re in a bad mood—imagine that? Imagine how hard it will then be for them to fight the nagging thought in their head that says, Hey—maybe this country should just be for me.

She has cast such a long shadow….

Do not take up space

If you’re like loud in public, maybe you buy something that a white person had their eye on and it was the last one, I don’t know—don’t do that type of stuff. It reminds them that you’re there, in a way.

Bleach

If any of you guys can make this work with minimal physical harm, I’d try it out. Let me know what color you end up.

Care for and uplift other oppressed minorities

Might be hard, but we should try this out now. I think this could be cool.

Have a sense of humor

We gotta just laugh, brother! Just make fun of ourselves! There should be an Indian version of the movie Black Dynamite. Worth a shot. Could go horribly wrong, though.

Find another director we like whose name is not Christopher Nolan

We gotta shake things up here. It’s been like fifteen years of this. We need a new avatar for all of our repressed aesthetic ideals. Other things can be cool—not everything has to be rapidly edited together montages and temporal trickery, my friends. How about we bet on a new horse—Claire Denis? Catherine Breillat? Lucrecia Martel?

Maybe we try out a new place—or, failing that, we just head back

Could be time to just check out a different spot. Taiwan, maybe. Peru. Mexico? Imagine a bunch of Indians in Mexico. Uh oh…better build that wall quick! Haha!

Ritam’s Footnote

Writing this on the back of a 30-hour Air-India-caused-bureaucratic flight ordeal. If there’s one person in this world who has a right to hate Indian people right now, it’s me. But I don’t. I love them. They are a beautiful people and culture.