{"id":9207,"date":"2010-07-01T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-07-01T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2010\/07\/01\/racism-or-storm-in-a-chai-cup\/"},"modified":"2010-07-01T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2010-07-01T12:00:00","slug":"racism-or-storm-in-a-chai-cup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2010\/07\/01\/racism-or-storm-in-a-chai-cup\/","title":{"rendered":"Racism or Storm in a Chai-Cup?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Source: www.lassiwithlavina.com<\/a><\/p>\n

NEW YORK, July 1, 2010: By now you’ve all read Joel Stein’s “My Own Private India” in TIME magazine – his tirade against Indians in Edison, NJ and heard of the hullabaloo that’s ensued. The bloggers, Indian media as well as regular folk are quite upset about Stein’s seemingly bigoted views.<\/p>\n

I gather that Stein writes mostly satire. In this piece I see him attempting to be an equal opportunity bigot – he mentions ‘stupid Americans.’ To me, it looks as if Stein was working on deadline, his funny bone was out of sync and the humor juices just weren’t flowing. He’s clutching at stereotyping straws, trying to find humor where there’s none.<\/p>\n

So, while I found a few things offensive in the article and felt sorry for Stein that he lived such a shuttered, parochial life, I didn’t find anything so evil in there as to proclaim a hartal. One should not forget the past; yet nor should one over-react to a supposedly satirical piece. So is this a train wreck of a humor piece or a racist rant which should be taken seriously by every Indian – and by extension, the South Asian community?<\/p>\n

Deepa Iyer, Executive Director, South Asian Americans Leading Together, feels it is a serious enough issue for the community to take action. One will have to see whether the controversy picks up steam in the coming days – or dies out, like the proverbial storm in a chai cup.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Source: www.lassiwithlavina.com NEW YORK, July 1, 2010: By now you’ve all read Joel Stein’s “My Own Private India” in TIME,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9207"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9207\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}