'Chinks' in armour?

‘Aye chinki’…Once the cause of many a tu-tu main-main on the roads, this form of address hardly evinces a reaction from me these days. Let’s just say I have developed a thick skin. How thick you may ask? Thick enough for me to ignore a man’s advances as he undresses me with his looks and winks, asking, “Wanna have some fun?” May sound filmi to many, but I have encountered this so many times, that I beg to think differently. If you can’t beat them or join them, you should just ignore them. After all, didn’t someone say ignorance is bliss? When people ask me, “Where are you from?” My answer is immediately followed by another question, Where is this Darjeeling?” The smarter ones look puzzled for some time until they discover that Darjeeling is somewhere in Nepal or Bhutan. Some others would happily club us all as “Northeasterns”, never mind if you come from Darjeeling, Sikkim, Assam, Manipur or Nagaland. People love to put us all under one umbrella that labels us as an ‘advanced’ race. And by advanced, I don’t mean the Indus Valley Civilisation kind. If you are a ‘chinki’, anything goes. You are so ‘modern’ that you don’t mind smoking, drinking, having casual sexual encounters, getting felt up in the bus... ‘Hey, it’s inherent in your culture, right?’ I was aware of this perception that people in the cities had of us, even before I stepped out of the Hills. I remember how Pratichee, from the girl band, Viva, voiced her disappointment while looking at some of the band’s photographs. She exclaimed on national television: “Chee, I look like a chinki!” Okay, so a chee normally precedes the word chinki! We cry hoarse when we face racial abuse in a foreign land but then turn a blind eye to the events back home. After all, bade bade deshon main aisi choti choti baatein to hoti rehti hai! People arugue why crimes against Manipuris, Nagas and Assamese are singled out as incidents of racial violence when the country abounds with crimes of such nature. But perhaps, if the Naga girl hadn’t been perceived as easy going, her otherwise reticent IIT scholar neighbour, who was found guilty of murdering her, would have continued to lead a repressed life the way that he had been doing so far. Incidents such as these make many retrace their steps from ‘big bad Delhi’. However, thanks to reality shows, the awareness is coming in, and people are suddenly waking up to our presence. So, while MTV Rock On mentions Karma Tenpo, a Tenzing finds mention in the Virgin Mobile ad. Thank God for it, else the way China has been going around claiming Tawang to be theirs, it’s just a matter of time before they stake a claim to Darjeeling, Sikkim and the rest of the Northeast. But given the fact that many of my fellow Indians do not even know that these places come under the Indian flag, they would not miss much, now, would they?