Monkey Business

The recent Indo-Australian cricket series 2008 had a series of incidents. Apart from bad umpiring decisions and aggressive posturing by the Aussies there was the the Harbhajan debacle. Harbhajan Singh was accused of calling Symmonds the Aussie cricketer a monkey which was allegedly due to his racist leanings based on the Australian's aboriginal origins. I am not sure as to what happened. As it turned out in fact the ICC judge exonerated Harbhajan from the charges since they could not be sufficiently corroborated.

But what was interesting is if calling someone a monkey indeed constitutes racism. There were all kinds of theories from our ever fertile minds. Some people said that since Hanuman the monkey God is worshiped in Hinduism, it is not a bad thing to call someone a monkey. To me that is the worst argument that can ever be used in favor of Harbhajan or Bhajji as he is sometimes called.   It is like saying that calling someone a "sheep" is not bad since Jesus the Shepherd is worshiped in Christianity.  People mock us for these ridiculous arguments and many times with good reason.

There were others who felt that Indians were always racist. Someone came up with the example of the Indian buffalo. He said that the majority of Indians drink buffalo milk (as opposed to cow milk). Yet we worship the cow and not the buffalo because the buffalo is black. Now it is true that "white" is a preferred color with a lot of Indians. People like to be fair skinned rather than dark skinned. But I have seldom seen an Indian being discriminated on the basis of his being black. On the other hand, most Hindu gods are black. Krishna literally means "the dark one". So a preference to a certain color would not necessarily translate to racism. Americans do like blonde people. That does not necessarily translate to "hair color racism". Or maybe it does...