A worst case scenario: unfriend, unfollow, block?

Hi guys, namaste. In my last post, I talked about my latest adventure: I am learning Hindi and it is a very challenging language to learn indeed, but I am really enjoying the process so far. Most of the feedback I have received so far has been either positive or at least neutral - an example of a typical comment was one left by a reader on my blog which reads,"That's exciting: learning a language from an entirely different family altogether. Good luck!" but one guy had been really discouraging. I got very angry with what he said to me and it led to a huge argument that resulted in me unfriending, unfollowing and blocking him on all social media platforms. This unraveled so fast, in a space of like 24 hours that I had blocked him before I even realized what happened, despite us having been friends for many years now. I guess I am just sharing with you guys what happened to allow you to judge me for what I have done because he had accused me of a lot of things, some which I thought were said out of spite and some I thought were quite true - at this stage I'm afraid  I can't undo what has happened, but for what it is worth, well I can at least learn some lessons from it.

Yup I lost my temper. 

Let's call this guy JB (no relation to his real name or Johor Bahru) - I had known him for many years already and had even been on holiday with him, that's how close we were. I had always seen him as a bit of a younger brother who is a bit naive and inexperience, whom I had to take care of but to be fair, he had been there for me as a friend. He got bored with life in London a few years ago and went to work in various places in Asia and North America, I encouraged him to go see the world and seek those new experiences. He is currently in Canada and thus when he posted this rather ignorant comment, I was shocked. Okay, here's what he said, I had deleted the comment so I can only try to recreate it rather than cut and paste the exact words. He said that the Indians would still see me as  "peasant caste" because of their caste system and no matter how fluent I become at Hindi, they will never ever accept me as one of their own because of their caste system. You see, if there's one thing that makes me lose my temper, it is white people talking shit about Asians and Asian culture. So yes, I totally lost my temper. I insulted him, berated him, scolded him: I called him racist, stupid and ignorant. I was so very angry and I went out of my way to vent the full brunt of my anger on him.

So this happened a few days ago and I've calmed down since so let me talk about the Indian caste system for a moment and how it treats outsiders like me. Obviously, I am not Indian, I don't live in India, I'm a complete outsider coming from outside their system and dealing with Indian people (of the upper caste/class within the corporate finance circles I work in) - so how are outsiders like me dealt with? Well, JB just assumed that Indians are so xenophobic and hate outsiders so much that outsiders would be automatically condemned to the lowest possible category in their caste system regardless of their individual circumstances. That couldn't be further from the truth but hey, don't take my word for it. One of my best friends Krishna was born in India but brought up in the UK, so I went to Krishna to get his opinion about how foreigners and  outsiders like myself are judged by Indians, if I were to be subjected to the caste/class system that still is a part of Indian society. So instead of me trying to look the answers up on the internet, this is what my friend Krishna taught me about the topic. The next part in dark blue is what Krishna taught me - so you're essentially reading what he taught me.

Indians generally tend to judge people on money, family and education - those factors tend to be wrapped up in a really messy way with the caste system though. Those from lower castes will have poor parents, who cannot afford to send them to good schools or get them the further education they need, so they will end up with crap jobs earning peanuts and yet another generation is stuck in poverty because of the poor start they have in life rather than the caste per se. As an outsider, if your family has had the money to buy you a good education and you now have a good job, you're earning loads of money - then to all intents and purposes, you're just like those from the upper castes and you'll be respected and accepted by those upper caste Indians who will see you as a social equal. This has nothing to do with the colour of your skin mind you, gone are the days when the white British ruled India as part of the Empire. Indians have seen plenty of piss-poor hippie white backpackers passing through India in search of enlightenment and finding no more than severe food poisoning. In short, Indians are judgmental people and we will judge you. Actually, you would have already been judged many times over by your Indian clients and the fact that they are happy to work with you means you have passed whatever tests or judgement they have subjected you to. Your friend made a mistake to assume that we condemn rather than judge, that's totally the opposite. Outsiders are simply judged exactly the same way as Indians judge each other. 

Since I am a law student, allow me to give you an analogy using law. It is one thing for someone to be thrown in jail without a trial at all - now that kind of thing happens in some countries where the police arrest you, you're locked up without even given a chance to prove your case before a judge or a court because the police have assumed that you're guilty. That's not the same as being brought before a court and a judge, sometimes a jury in some countries and having your case heard. Now whether or not you have a fair trial or a reasonable judge is another matter - but at least if you get to that stage, your case is being judged in an open court. Your friend is assuming that Indians would just automatically condemn you to the lowest possible caste based on the fact that you're a foreigner, an outsider - as an Indian person, I'm telling you that is definitely not the case. You will be judged by the Indian people you meet and based on what they find out about you, they will then decide where you would fit in within their complex social class and caste system. Indians are judgmental and love passing judgement, they love participating in the process whereby they process the information presented to them and then pass the sentence, "I have judged you and shall place you in this category based on the evidence I have seen." Someone who bypasses all that judgment and rushes to condemnation is not interested in participating in this process but Indians love judging others, all Indians do it to foreigners, outsiders and locals alike. 

In making such a presumption, your friend clearly knows nothing about Indian society or culture. In fact, the caste system by and large is frowned upon in almost every major city and if you're competent and respectful then no one really cares that much in modern India. Some Indians would distance themselves from the caste system but it is a system that has been a part of Indian society for such a very long time. There are 'caste quotas' in various aspects of education and employment to ensure that those from lower castes do not suffer from discrimination. What I have to point out however, is that it has not disappeared as such but it has evolved to a system of social classes much like that in other Western countries, where people are judged on their wealth, their education, their family background and their individual merits. This reflects an important change in modern Indian society: social mobility is a huge factor in helping this old caste system evolve into a class-based system that fits out modern society. There are indeed many success stories of Dalits - the outcasts at the very bottom of the caste system - becoming extremely rich and successful in India today. Of course, these case studies are the exception and not the norm, but at least India is a country today where there is some social mobility possible, where those lower down the caste system still have a chance to become successful unlike those their ancestors. I can talk about the caste system for ages, but please allow me to go back to the subject about "outsiders". 

Let's go back two or three generations ago, Indians were a lot more insular: I think about the life that my great-grandparents led back in India. They lived in a rural settlement, they didn't have friends or relatives from more than like 100 km or so away. Their world was very small and they were limited in their opportunities to interact with outsiders, never mind foreigners - they hardly ever got to meet people from other parts of India. So if you had a time machine to go back to India then, you'll be dealing with a very different mindset and a very different culture. But this is 2017, India may not be a rich country but we're a remarkably well-educated country. This means that a lot of younger Indians today are growing up with social media, able to learn about the world far beyond our borders, watch plenty of TV programmes and movies from America and we feel a lot more connected to the rest of the world in a way our grandparents never were. Richer Indians are sending their kids to be educated abroad, even poorer Indians are working abroad to earn more money. Ordinary Indians are connected to the world outside India in so many ways today, so dealing with foreigners and learning to judge foreigners we come into contact with is really nothing new for us. Is your friend imagining you landing on the remote North Sentinel Islands and meeting some really isolated villages who have never seen a foreigner before? I hate to say this, but I shudder to think what his impressions of India are. Like you, I get just as irked when white people jump to these kinds of ridiculous conclusions.  Don't get me wrong, no I don't expect everyone to be an expert on Indian culture of course - I simply expect those who don't know much to refrain from making such crazy assumptions. 

Now that we have gotten the sociology lesson from Krishna out of the way, let's go back to what happened. I was way too angry to give JB any kind of history, geography or sociology lesson about India. Besides, I took it as a personal insult as well - I thought JB felt that I wasn't intelligent enough to learn how to deal with Indians in the business world, that I would give them such a bad impression that they would automatically condemn me to the lowest, worst possible category from within their social system. Imagine if you said to me, "I'm learning windsurfing," and I reply, "oh dear, are you sure you want to do this? Be careful you don't drown." Yeah, that sounds a bit extreme, but that's exactly what JB did to me: I said I was learning Hindi to deal with my Indian clients and he presented a worst case scenario. What is wrong with him? Who says such nasty, discouraging things like that to a friend? Look, if say my sister told me she was learning windsurfing, I would assume that my sister is sensible enough to know how to take the necessary precautions and take lessons from a trained instructor, so she could have all the fun without worrying about the dangers. Most of all, I trust her, I know she would never do anything stupid or crazy like windsurf in the middle of a hurricane - she's way too sensible and intelligent, thus based on that, it would never cross my mind to raise a 'worst case scenario' with her regardless of whatever activity she chooses to do. I completely trust my sister and I had hoped that JB would have trusted me too. 

Anyway, I suppose I could have given JB a lesson on both Indian sociology as well as "how to avoid saying the wrong things on social media 101", but instead I just totally lost my temper. It descended into a tirade of vicious abuse. I mostly talked about how when we went on holiday together, he didn't even make any effort to learn a word of the local language, he knew nothing about the country's culture and he was like a bull in a china shop sometimes when he spoke to the locals. When we were in a supermarket, he spoke to the shopkeeper in a really condescending voice, "do you have Greek yogurt? Like you know, really thick yogurt?" And the shopkeeper looked quite annoyed and replied in perfect English, "Sir, we have a wide range of yogurts in store, including really thick Greek yogurt - you can find them over there." And JB walked over there and was like, "wow look, they really do have Greek yogurt here!" And I was like please, I'm so embarrassed at the way you treated that supermarket worker - like of course they have Greek yogurt here, we're in Eastern Europe, not in somewhere like China where people are generally lactose intolerant. I let that incident go then, but I sure gave him hell about the yogurt when I lost my temper with him. I told him that he was ignorant and stupid, that he was a pain and an embarrassment to travel with. Yeah basically, in my rampage, I destroyed our friendship by going out of my way to insult him. Like that's just one incident, I raised quite a few more to demonstrate his sheer stupidity.  

What can I say? JB isn't exactly that smart.

Did JB apologize for what he said about the Indian caste system? No, instead he got very angry at the way I had attacked him. I had lost my temper, I just wasn't thinking about the consequences as I lashed out at him. Instead, well, he called me an autistic bitch who was abusive and had no respect for anyone but myself, he said my outburst was totally uncalled for and he said that I had hurled ridiculous accusations at him. You see, in the West, calling someone a racist is like the worst possible thing you can say to someone - it is such a line in the sand you do not cross and I called him a terrible racist in assuming the very worst of the Indians, in assuming that Indians are xenophobic towards outsiders (which as Krishna had explained, is untrue). Well, he got really upset that I could accuse him racist; he didn't really mind being called stupid or ignorant but racist? That was one step too far and he got just as angry with me. We traded insults and well, things got ugly quickly - it pretty much boiled down to me getting the satisfaction of unfriending and blocking him first before he did that to me. Game over. Great, a friendship of many years gone, just like that. Oh goodness me.

Is JB a bad person? No I don't think so, I think he was just plain stupid. I can tell you that he knows absolutely nothing about India, he may have worked a short time in the Far East but that was not in India - he confessed that he has heard something about the caste system from a friend who has visited India and there was just a part of him that wanted to demonstrate that he was taking an interest in what I was doing by raising that point. I told him that you don't show interest in what someone is doing by assuming the very worst of the situation - well, ironically, my severely autistic parents do that to me all the bloody time. They are completely devoid of any social skills and their idea of a conversation is to pick up on one or two words they recognize and run off on a tangent with it. I suppose JB did the same thing - he picked up on the word 'India' and hurled the first thing he knew about India into the conversation without even thinking if it was valid (or in this case, racist and quite offensive). I have to take a deep breath and ignore my parents' stupidity when they do that because, well, what is the point of getting angry with my parents each time they do something like that. I can't cure their stupidity, I just have to be so thankful I didn't inherit the stupid genes. But when JB did exactly what my parents do all the time, I suppose a part of me snapped like a dry twig. I don't scold my parents when they do something bloody stupid but I can scold JB. I suppose I had a real Louis Litt moment when I projected all my frustrations onto JB. Remember the Stefanie Patel story line from Suits, when he shouted at her because he was angry at something else?

I don't know where that leaves me with JB. I consulted someone who knew JB well during the time he was in London and he said, "yup, that sounds like the kind of shit JB would say, I know him well. He says dumb shit all the time like that which can offend some people - but you must realize he's not doing it out of malice, he's just being stupid, like a bull in a china shop. He doesn't censor his thoughts, the words just pop out of his mouth without any consideration. He just says what he thinks without considering the effect of his words. It can be a pain when that happens but when it happens on social media, it can be ten times worse because you can't tell if he posted the comment as a knee-jerk reaction or not. He doesn't live here anymore, he's several time zones away so it is up to you if you want to repair that friendship or not. Are you prepared to accept him for the person he is - a good person at heart who can sometimes say stupid things? You were good friends after all, his 'stupidity' wasn't an issue before. Or do you want to decide that you have enough friends in my life, you may have to put up with this kind of crap from your parents but you can choose not to be friends with people like JB, just to spare yourself this kind of crap? The choice is yours, you can be sorry for the way you went too far in berating him for having said something stupid - you should recognize that he was tactless and stupid, rather than malicious or racist. But if you choose not to be his friend, then I can respect that - it is your choice after all. Friends should bring us joy into our lives and JB's tactless antics tantamount to some kind of micro-aggression that you could rather do without, then so be it. Life is too short, just move on - but please don't demonize him as a nasty racist, okay?

So that's it from me on this topic - what do you think? Am I a nasty, autistic bitch? Do I lack compassion in refusing to give JB the benefit of the doubt? Or am I allowed to be human and lose my temper when a white person talks shit about Asians? Or is there a compromise to be struck between being a doormat who takes abuse and a totally unforgiving, uncompromising bitch? What does one do after losing one's temper? What would you have done if your friend said something racist and insulting like that? I guess in an ideal world, he would have apologized for his crass remark and I would've apologized for losing my temper but that just didn't happen. Leave a comment below, many thanks for reading.