good article found on the net http://www.shivamvij.com/2007/02/the-stain-that-just-wont-wash.html The stain that just won’t wash Published by Shivam Vij 11 months, 2 weeks ago in Newsy posts. Like many other students from Africa, John Patrick Ojwando chose to come to India, to Mysore, for higher education as it was cheaper here than in Europe or the US. Ojwando is from Kenya, which has a large Indian population, and so he thought India wouldn’t seem too foreign. But it was only when he arrived here that he realised just how much of an outsider Indians could make him feel, and that Indians in India were in fact plainly racist. That persistent gaze on the street that Ojwando faced, people assured him, came from curiosity. After all, many he met didn’t even know where Kenya was. The name-calling followed: strangers and even people known to him would call him a monkey. “When even English-speaking people behave like this, I don’t see how you could say it comes from any kind of curiosity,” Ojwando says. He learned soon enough to call ‘curiosity’ by its proper name: there were landlords who wouldn’t rent out rooms to Africans and there were parents who wouldn’t approve of their daughters going out with Black men. “It surely is racism when people refuse to sit next to you in a bus, when people you don’t know sneer at you, and when you’re pointed out to kids and called a ‘negro’.” All of this, Ojwando admits, is subtler than the insulting, sometimes violent behaviour understood as racism in the West. “But Indians are caught in the middle, they look up to the Whites and look down on the Blacks. They clearly see themselves as being in between.” Ojwando did make efforts to bring the large numbers of Africans in India’s metros together to speak out against the treatment they receive, but he met with little success. “A friend wouldn’t go to college because of how he was treated he just studied at home and turned up for the exams. Most Africans say they just want t