Posted by: A_P December 16, 2009
Login in to Rate this Post:
0 
? 
?
Here's a little twist. Is the following sentence offensive? Or, should we all feel all good that we're being called brave?
"नेपाली लोग बहादुर है।"
And, here's a little story. I had a roommate in college, a guy from DC. Every time I talked to him about Nepal (my homeland), he used to talk about Lesotho (a country where he spent 2 years of his life doing Peace Corps work). It got to a point I felt irritated and decided to deal with it. So, I asked him, "Are you from Lesotho?" Of course he wasn't and I knew it. He was the son of a rich and powerful Jewish American couple who hobnobbed in the power circles inside the beltway.
"What do you mean?" He asked.
"Every time I talk about my home, you talk about Lestotho. Why?" I asked.
From then on, he stopped talking to me about Lesotho when I talked about Nepal.
Now, don't go about thinking that I have anything against learning about a southern African land-locked country.
What irritated me was he failed to look at Nepal as my homeland, and only looked at it as a Third World, underdeveloped country.
Moral: Look at the individual; not at the class. If you don't, you'd be stereotyping. Unless, of course, you're doing a critical paper on some political science, sociology or anthropology course.
It's amazing that this simple point is being lost in this debate, which I think is going off on tangent now.
Pixie's issue is never really about the language. It's about stereotyping. That's why she was not sure whether to feel good or irritated about it.