There was a time when Australia adopted White Australia Policy to ensure that Chinese can't come and stay there. That was a really shocking form of official racism and now it’s turn of even more abhorrent from of violent racism ‘curry bashing’ that is targeting Indians. Not that racism against Indians is a new phenomena in Australia, I always heard of stray incidents like these from friends. And why only Australia, it’s also true for other countries – after my MBA when I had a choice to take up a job in either London or Singapore, one of the key reasons why I preferred Singapore over London was because I knew that Indians do face racism even in London.

Also, isn't racism just another form of protectionism. When Obama says that he wants to bring back jobs from Bangalore to Buffalo, is he in someway not promoting discrimination in an inter-connected global economy of today. It’s shocking at times when you look at double standards of western countries. First whiff of recession and years of talking open market at WTO goes for a toss with liberal-capitalist economies in US & Europe start talking protectionism, , US starts talking tax restrictions to discoursge outsourcing, after blaming developing countries for not doing enough on environment for years Australia decide to push back certain environmental regulations by 2 years citing recession.

I am reading Shantaram these days and there is this one line in that which stayed with me long after I have turned many pages. There is a French character Didier in this book and he tells the protagonist something which goes like “India is about siz times the size of France, But it has almost twenty times the population. If there were a billion Frenchmen living in such a crowded space, there would be rivers of blood. Rivers of blood! And, as everyone knows, we French are the most civilized people in Europe. Indeed, in the whole world.” Why am quoting it here is because I thought that what author meant was that the self-proclaimed superiority of west is to certain extent a result of being at the right place in right time.

The other day I was in a cab got talking to the cabbie, he was a Singaporean-Chinese and he had a theory why this recession won’t impact China and India. He told me that Indians and Chinese work had, work long because they know the value of money and so they will definitely survive these times. And probably the modern day racism is not arising out of any superiority complex but may be out of fear and frustration in west regarding this survival instinct of east. It’s a fear of those Indian kids winning spelling-bee, fear of Indian-Chinese kids outsmarting them in their own Universities, it’s a fear of these brown n yellow guys who were just smart team members once, now becoming the team managers. It’s probably this fear of competition which is manifesting itself in all the racism and protectionism that we are witnessing these days.

But coming back to Australian attacks, I hope that these condemnable incidents in Australia come to a halt and all the Indian students/professionals in Australia could live in peace. But if they don't, I wish that Indian students start giving Oz universities a so that these universities suffer. After all, lot of these universities which hold education fair in India every year make a lot of their fees from Indian rupees converted to Aussie dollars.

PS: One Indian I must blame for these attacks on Indian students in Australia is ARJUN SINGH, with reservation in higher-education, guys and girls have been forced to look abroad to realize their education dreams and thus expose themselves to such dangers as Shravan Kumar and Baljinder Singh have faced.