#i place very clear (polite but clear) boundaries against anything or anyone that won’t promote peace in the long run

[izvmimi]

this is a general thought and not about anything in particular, but sometimes for me, as someone who shows love through perceiving, it gets really frustrating because it feels like people really want you to see them but be blind to any part they don’t want to show and like for me love isn’t pretending you can only see someone as perfect but seeing them as they are and hoping they know that you love them even with the things they want to work on

[fdhfjdafdajfa]

Maybe another reason I'm accused of claiming to be a dalit, despite never EVER having said anything even REMOTELY close, is because I am up front about being affected by caste issues. But the reason I am affected by caste issues is not becauase I in particular belong to any certain caste. The reason I am affected by caste issues is because I live in India (or under Indian occupation, now) and everyone who lives in (or under) India is affected by caste issues.

It is my savarna detractors who are mistaken in their beliefs. Those beliefs are first that they themselves are not affected by caste issues, and second that my social position is similar to theirs.

As regards the first I do not need to go into very much detail about it. As they are the privileged in society it does not require much suspension of disbelief to consider that they might be very mistaken as to the mechanism of their social dominance. The belief that they are unaffected by caste is a simple chauvanism; nothing more, nothing less. They believe that caste means Dalit, that caste is found not in their own families and universities and overseas poc networks and stupid overbearing social media presence, but in rural Dalit households. Nothing new. These are the people who will run countless studies on Dalits and none on themselves, searching up and down and all around, searching for the elusive caste everywhere except under their own noses. Fortunately my second wave training made it pretty obvious to me where I might find it. I was right on the mark in my initial assessment that to Savarnas, caste is an enclosed patriarchy, and caste can be found in what is now called Brahminical Patriarchy, which is something that Brahmins who say stuff like “sex work is work” in a country where prostitution is an ancestral profession can hardly be expected to understand the nature of.

As regards the second, I will dispel it, but not to prove my own victimhood -- victimhood is not the basis of ability to speak and I need no such thing -- but to establish to the Brahmins that we are not and will never be anything alike. This is an assertion of boundaries only.

I need to say that even if the second premise was truethat we did occupy comparable social position,  I would still be required to talk about caste and the way it affects me in order to mount a serious social analysis. That they do not do so shows that they are not serious social analysts full stop, but just Brahmins after social clout. As if their choice in "issues" to "discuss" and the ways they "discuss them" didn't already make that obvious.

But the bigger issue is this. As I said in the post that started all of this, upper caste Hindus have this very weird thing about white people. Now as part of this Very Weird Thing, the Hindus have a strong desire for white approval and wrongly consider that their culture has anything in common with white western culture, especially in comparison to groups they consider to be ignorant, backward, and more conservative and less enlightened than them. 

This isn’t really true. Hindus have no history of womens’ struggle, no belief in social equality, they love wasting food -- do the people constantly making fun of white people for casseroles really think that we won’t notice or be bothered by the fact that they consider food to be polluted and unshareable once it’s eaten from? It’s viscerally repellant to me to see a Brahmin throw away perfectly good food that’s still warm even -- they hate beef which is at least three food groups for Americans. So we’re talking about two very different groups of people, and while the Brahmins claim that all of these repellant traits of theirs are “Indian things”, that isn’t true, they’re just savarna things, and we have them in common with Muslims, Christians, Dalits, and other groups in society that Brahmins look down and despise because of these traits. A Savarna who turns green at the sight of an omelette doesn’t like it any better because a white person made it. They still ain’t gonna wanna share utensils.

The only reason this stereotype persists at all is due to aggressive propogation of it by Brahmins abroad and all Savarnas in India, made easier by the systemic exclusion of everyone else from English language education.

Not only do Brahmins hate people because of these traits on a personal level, but it is legal, and the rule, not the exception, to discriminate openly based on not only them, but also on race and nationality itself.

Where the stereotype that white people are unaffected by this comes from is that it is true that in places like South Bombay and Gurgaon, where my haters live, there are neighbourhoods (the term we use in India is “colonies”, but without the same connotation, any neighbourhood can be a colony regardless of who lives there) where some very rich white expats live where they can pay a great deal of money to insulate themselves from India. It’s true that they don’t have to worry about discimination in housing, and are nonplussed at everyday occurrances like being charged extra for stuff. These people probably constitute a decent percentage of white people in India; the exact statistic probably isn’t known but they’re highly visible for the same reason all rich people are. What else should be kept in mind is that they may be privileged in society, but no moreso than Savarnas of their income level. All of these traits are things they share with rich Savarnas -- so maybe they have this in common with this particular group of white people.

What is not talked about much is the other two groups of white people that I know to exist in India, those being Israelis and Russians. Now Israelis are actually pretty well integrated in Goa and Himachal, they’re mostly like me -- long term tourist visa stays. The stereotype that they overstay their visa is largely not true. The stereotype that’s even less true is that there’s an “israeli mafia” that runs drugs back and forth between Himachal and Goa, which owns businesses and land in towns like Kasol, and is also heavily involved in other underground crimes. The BJP’s 2017 electoral campaign centred largely around this fictional Jewish Mafia, and it won this campaign. I should also note that antisemitic and nazi imagery is even more common in Himachal than in the rest of India. I even saw Indians walking around with Third Reich flags on their t-shirts a couple times.

So that’s the Israelis. What are the Russians doing? Well, some of them are economic migrants. But more visibly they’re being sex trafficked just like everywhere else in the world. A hookup once told me that in her ex’s apartment building, there was a floor full of Russian prostitutes that would go missing during election season. The political parties openly commit crimes like this and since the parties also control the police there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Their position is very similar to Bangladeshi and Nepali women. Does this affect peoples’ perceptions? You tell me.

So, getting back to the issue of the bizarre Hindu craving for white approval, this takes the form of sexual harassment very, very often. Another thing contributing to this is the widespread use of porn in India; the women in porn are mostly white. Bollywood has this problem too, where it’s a common plot that the protagonist of the film dates a “sexually open” white woman to get his bullshit phases out of the way before realising he needs someone who can cook and clean to spend his life with and marries an Indian woman (implicitly of his caste). 

So, acknowledging the following non-exhaustive list of some formal disabilities that I experience BY LAW -- 1. it is legal to discriminate in housing, 2. it is not legal for me to seek employment, 3. I am not allowed a vote or representation 4. There is no available path to citizenship from someone of my socioeconomic class 5. I cannot take advantage of government programs -- we are left with two remaining possible sites in which white privilege could possibly be found. 

The first one of these is uncomplicatedly fake. It was RSSBJP propaganda in the late 00′s and early-mid 2010′s that everyone in India is brainwashed by white people to believe that they are culturally inferior. This is pretty clear and flagrant fascist propaganda that has been weaponised to some pretty destructive ends. For example, it was asserted that Hindi is the indigenous language of India and natural language of all Indians (it’s not) and the reason anyone wants to learn English is because white people have brainwashed them into believing it’s superior to Hindi. Actually what this was was RSSBJP brainwashing a bunch of savarnas into believing that they’re race traitors for speaking the “coloniser tongue” (In reality Hindi is the coloniser tongue, and this is again a caste issue, but this is long already) and that this was white peoples’ fault. White people remain a preferred target because the imagination of the colonial era lends itself easily to the claim, because India’s millennia-old obsession with light skin bears a superficial resemblence to colour discrimination in the west, and because the “opposition leader” at the time, Rahul Gandhi, is half-Italian on his mother’s side.

Yes, the party in power criticises the “opposition leader” on the basis that he’s the half-white son of a naturalised citizen of the Republic of India. Yes, it works. Such privilege! Even Obama’s accusers at least had to cloak it, they couldn’t just come out and say “it’s bad that you are that race”.

Anyway, as white people have no such mind control ability, and no control over Indian media or any other resource through which they might promote such an idea, and the source of the claim has a clear conflict of interest, we can not only dismiss it but be reminded to keep a look out for it as it has ingrained itself into social imagination and in fact become another nonsense accusation against which I must constantly defend myself.

The second site is one I am willing to entertain, and it’s that white privilege is extant in relation to other groups of foreigners. If this is the case it’s still something that native-born Indians have absolutely no business grilling me on, because to be a foreginer is itself to face a certain level of social exclusion, which makes them the privileged class on the foreigner/native axis. This one, I’m, y’know, willing to talk about, but only with people who have any damn business bringing it up, not a bunch of Brahmin social climbers. Something often brought up is that people do make room for white foreigners (at least). This is true. I can’t really speak to whether people from other groups have the same experience (except for one or two anecdotal examples, which, for the record, indicate that they do) but even acknowledging that is an admission that such efforts are necessary. What else should be kept in mind is that they are spectacularly unsuccessful. 

So returning to the elephant in the room (get it because elephants are a symbol of buddhism which... yeah) is that there are power dynamics in India which matter other than race and class and that’s religion. As already established, this country is run by a genocidal, anti-Muslim hate cult. Now you can argue that because I’m white it doesn’t matter than I’m a Muslim, and I’ll be counted as a Christian, which is a very Hindu conclusion, and the most staggeringly ignorant thing imaginable to say but it turns out Hindus can just say any words in whatever order they want, so I’ll deal with this argument anyway.

The genocidal hate cult that runs the country is also anti-Christian. So, that’s that on that. The only thing is, the Good Brahmins don’t have any more good to say about Christians, particularly white Christian missionaries, than their RSSBJP immediate relatives do. Attacks against Christians, including white missionaries, are a daily occurrance in India being most common in the liberal paradise state of Tamil Nadu, and they are celebrated by Good Brahmin and Bad Brahmin alike as well as their boot lickers on social media, including this website.

But if we want to acknowledge the reality that I am a Muslim, then we have to take into account that BJP rhetoric assumes all Muslims to be infiltrators and foreigners. The only reason this is not taken into account by Good Brahmins on this website is that harbour the same prejudice as their immediate relatives, and so are unable to recognise them as harmful. For instance I’ve been accused of being undocumented or overstaying my visa by several people in the past few days. Careful readers will remember this stereotype from the Israelis earlier. It’s not true for them, and it’s not true for me -- I’m here legally but in a compromised, non-citizen status compromised by widespread discrimination and ground-level lack of access to theoretically available resources on account of my socioeconomic class. If this screams “invulnerable” to you, hoo boy.

TL;DR To quote one of my favourite Urdu poets, “The only thing we have in common is I’m a dick and you suck.”

[avaalons]

Chris Evans Fic: Disney Princess Series Part 2 (Reality)

Sequel time! This is a sequel to Disney Princess Obsession, requested by the lovely @pegasusdragontiger, who wanted Chris and Sleeping Beauty to be reunited: “Sequel to Princess Obsession, She is cast in the next Avengers movie with Chris they are awkward and flirty with each other and do interviews together to promote the movie. In an interview the interviewer ask’s their favourite part or ride in Disneyland Chris of course answers as dot he fellow cast mates and everyone looks to her and she say’s she hasn’t been to Disneyland everyone ask’s why said well 1)her family never had the money and the other she hasn’t had time and Chris desides to take.”

***

So, I’ve got to ask, how has working together been since Chris’ epic humiliation after the Oscars?

‘Really dude? We’re really going to go here again?’ Flushed pink tinged Chris cheeks as he barked out an embarrassed laugh. It had taken weeks and weeks of hardcore charm offensive from him for you to drop your guard around him after his put his foot and most of his leg in his mouth when he met you on the press line at the Academy Awards, and then again when he was asked about you in an interview. And now in every interview on this fucking press tour, his massive blunder was brought up time after time.

You’d been polite of course, from the moment you met him. You’d taken a deep breath, pushed your shoulders back and, when he walked into the room for your introduction, you stuck out your hand politely and addressed him as Mr Evans. You were going to be working together for the best part of the next twelve months and you wanted to set very clear boundaries from the start. His bright expression had fallen a fraction but he had recovered quickly, shook your hand warmly, closing his free hand over yours, sandwiching your dainty fingers between his palms.

‘Please, its Chris,’ he’d said, ‘And I just wanted to say that I am beyond sorry for…’

‘Oh, don’t worry about it! I found it funny, honestly. Nothing to worry about.’

You’d cut him off quickly with a smile and a wave of your hand, your other one still snug in his fingers. You absolutely did not want to listen to an apology for his comments. You hadn’t been offended when you heard about it. You’d been flattered even! He seemed like a nice guy, friendly and open, and that was difficult to come by in your line of work. But this movie was a huge win for you and you would be doing everything in your power to ensure your time on the movie was a success. And that meant keeping Chris Evans, his blue eyes, dazzling smile and warm hands at arm’s length and then some. Right after he let you go. Any second now.

He did, eventually, after a few more absent-minded gentle shakes and a slightly awkward silence, let you go with an ‘okay then,’ and a ‘let’s get started shall we?’

And it had been fine, really. The cast were close and you were made to feel nothing but welcome. After a few weeks, you couldn’t help but defrost a little bit, swept up as you were in the easy atmosphere and natural banter that flowed between them all. You and Chris had found an easy rhythm and, dare you say it, had developed something resembling a friendship. It wasn’t anything to write home about, but that was fine by you. It was safe and you weren’t doing anything to make anyone question your professionalism.

But these interviews were getting on your last nerve. You felt for Chris, he was the one getting the brunt of the humiliation of course, but he bore it well. He laughed it off every time, talked about how professional you both were and how you had graciously accepted his apology. A couple of times, he’d even offered you a fist bump as a show of camaraderie and to make it clear to anyone watching that his verbal eruption had resulted in only friendship.

You were irritated though. There were six other cast members on this particular interview and it must have been annoying for them as well. This must have been the seventh or eighth time this question had come up and it really had nothing to do with anything. So you brightened your smile, leaned forward on to rest your chin on your curled fingers coquettishly and turned your attention to the interviewer.

‘Working together has been brilliant! He’s a funny, intelligent, very sensitive guy, not to mention he’s fairly easy on the eye right?’ At this, you held out your palms and gave a exaggerated wink to the camera for good measure, 'I mean, what girl on this planet wouldn’t be beside themselves if they heard the Chris Evans talking about her like that? And, as it turned out, it was a great ice breaker when we officially met for work for the first time.’

A chiming laugh and an affectionate light punch against Chris’ shoulder completed your scene perfectly and everyone in the room laughed along with you. Once you knew you had the interviewer and other press people on side, you cast a subtle glance in Chris’ direction and he gave you an equally subtle smile. He appreciated the intervention and the interview could move on.

Okay, next question. So, let’s talk everyone’s favourite subject - Disney. We’re all familiar with Disney parks right? So what’s your favourite Disney theme park ride?

You waited patiently as your fellow cast mates answered, sometimes debating, or bringing a lesser known or forgotten ride to mind. You stayed quiet until Chris turned to you.

'And what about you, what’s your favourite ride?’

You stalled slightly, unsure of the best way to respond without starting a pity party.

'Unbelievable I know but I’ve actually never been to Disney! So, honestly, I wouldn’t know.’

Chris’ mouth dropped open, 'What?! You were a Disney Princess! How can you have never been to Disney? Were you born an adult and skipped being a kid altogether.’

'Oh, you know, we just lived a long way from a park and… we just didn’t manage to get to one,’ you shrugged like it was no big deal, wishing the questions would move on.

Chris placed a hand against his chest dramatically, pretending to be speechless as he drew laughs from everyone in the room. You laughed along too.

'Really Chris? It’s not a thing. Lots of people have never been to Disney.’

'We’re going. You. Me. Hardcore Disney park visiting. I’m gonna get you some Mickey Mouse ears and make you go on every ride, make you queue up for photos with characters, eat in every country’s restaurant in Epcot. It’s going to be amazing.’

Everyone continued to laugh at his enthusiasm and ridiculousness and he placed his hand on your shoulder, almost as if making a deal. You thought he might have noticed your discomfort because he moved the interview on pretty quickly after that, keeping the attention on him and away from you.

Eventually, the day came to an end and you could all retire back to your hotels to freshen up before dinner. As you were striding through the halls, you heard a voice behind you.

'Hey, wait up!’

You span around to see Chris approaching you with a light jog.

'Everything okay?’ You paused your walk and waited rfor him.

'That thing about Disney before. Why have you never been? Really?’

You shrugged, 'There’s no big mystery here Chris, my family just couldn’t afford it. I have loads of siblings and there’s no away my parents could have got us all there. I used to watch the tv ads but I got over it. Grew out of it.’

Chris was quiet for a beat and he leaned against the wall with his shoulder, tucking one foot behind the other. You wondered if you’d made him uncomfortable. You had reached a level of friendliness but you weren’t really at the sharing stage.

Eventually though, he found his words, 'You don’t ever grow out of Disney, I promise. I already spoke to my mom. You are officially invited on the trip.’

That really threw you, 'Chris! I can’t go on your family trip! It’s a family trip for a reason.’

You’d met some of his family members briefly during shooting when they would visit but you’d had certainly not spent enough time with them to be invited on their annual trip.

'Unfortunately, now the whole of the clan know that you have never experienced the wonder of Disney, they won’t let me go without you sooooo… if you don’t go, I don’t get to go either. And that would really break my heart,’ there was that easy smile. You needed to be careful.

'Chris… this is too much. What will people think? It’s not like we can wander around under cover. You’re not exactly inconspicuous.’

Chris just laughed, 'Sweetheart, if I cared what people thought, I’d never open my damn mouth, as well we both know. So, of course I’m not going to kidnap you and throw you on a plane, but I really do think you should experience Disney at least once in your life, and you may as well do it with a bunch of people that are shameless Disney nerds. So, if you’re not doing anything over the holidays, you should come with us. My mom likes having a lot of people around. When I’m a good boy, I get to take a friend.’

His grin was infectious.

You stalled, trying to decide. You felt like you were on the edge of cliff and one good shove was going to send you plummeting. This was everything you said you wouldn’t do. More than you said you wouldn’t do, in fact. Much more. This would force this professional friendship you had into something resembling a real, outside-of-work relationship. Platonic, of course.

'Don’t take this the wrong way but… this is definitely a friend thing, right?’ You had to maintain some semblance of boundary.

He cocked his head on one side, curiosity etched into his features, 'Of course, unless you…’

He raised an eyebrow and used his index finger to gesture between the two of you.

You instantly wished you hadn’t said anything and as a result, was too hasty in your response, 'What?! No. No! Of course not. No way. Just friends.’

That stupid, curious grin was still dancing on his lips, 'Just friends, right. But this means you’ll come with us, yes? I assume that there’s no reason for you to refuse since we’ve established that we are just friends.’

You’d been backed into a corner, you’d realised. Now, if you refused, it would seem like it was because you had feelings for him or something.

'Yeah. Yes. Okay, that would be really great. Thank you. For inviting me. And thank your mom too. Just let me know when I need to be there and I’ll sort my air travel and hotels and… stuff.’ 'Amazing. Best news I’ve had all day! I’ll go message the family group now. Don’t worry about the logistics, you’ll be staying with us anyway. We get a villa. I’ll email you the details,’ he shifted from the wall and made to walk in the direction of his own room, 'I’m excited! I love it when I’m with someone who’s seeing it for the first time.’

'Even when said person is almost 30?’

'Especially then,’ he gave you a slight wink before starting to walk away, one hand tucked in the pocket of his jeans. After a few paces he called out over his shoulder, 'Check your emails in a little while.’

'O-Okay,’ you called back. You still weren’t quite sure what you had agreed to, but there was a smile on your face and your steps felt lighter as you walked back to your room.

And if you did check and refresh your emails every five minutes for the rest of the night, you didn’t beat yourself up about it.