The issue of the week is...

So I’m sitting here watching a panel discussion on the highest rating Indian television channel. The topic is ‘Is Australia stuck in a white’s only mindset.’ It has now been 5 days and 5 nights of CONSTANT fever-pitch coverage of the three horrid attacks on Indian students in Melbourne and Sydney. Words cannot describe how damaging it has been for my country’s reputation here.

Last Wednesday I was so sad that these visitors to my country had been treated so shabbily. I wished the numbskull 17 year old schmucks, who wander Melbourne’s train system making nuisances of themselves, would understand that robbing and beating people is unacceptable. I felt for the families in India who had sent their children so far away in pursuit of education - and their worries. I felt for the students who arrived in a foreign country and found the adjustment hard. I was glad that my people were appalled, that governments were promising action, and that Indian students were making their voices heard. That was 5 days ago.

The media here seized on the racism angle – and with reason, after all three Indian kids lay in hospital, hit by separate attacks in separate parts of Melbourne and Sydney. But since then, Wednesday last week, there has barely been a new fact to discuss. Instead the media has wallowed in the racism story. The pursuit of fact has been abandoned for the endless recitation of opinion. I have never seen such a self-indulgent display of group-think in my life. There are NO dissenting voices.

The presenter asks “Is Australia, a country of convicts, trying to overcompensate for its geography by being whiter than white.” A pompous man responds with “yes” and starts rabitting on like an encyclopaedia about a policy scrapped three years before my birth 32 years ago. This is trash journalism. I wish I could call up and tell them how much the accusation of racism hurts. “Racist” is not a word to be thrown around lightly.

So, tonight I’ve had enough – India is pissing me off. I want to go home to my city, Melbourne, and be reassured that it remains one of the most multicultural places on earth, richer for it, challenged by it, but a snapshot of our global future. I pray that tomorrow the sun will rise and India’s media will find something more important to talk to itself about.