Hull

Alive!

[Hull @Hullbach]

Never forget! Never forgive! #2611MumbaiAttack

[Rakesh Krishnan Simha @ByRakeshSimha]

Yashita Banymadhub, a British citizen from Mauritius, faced racism over her name all her childhood. Not just her classmates but her PE teacher would mock her as "Yashitty." But she refused to change it. At least not entirely. Here's her story.

1/ “Your name’s got s**t in it.” Said by a so-called best friend on a school trip. Yashita was just 14.

2/ At school in the UK, classmates turned it into “Yashitty.” The popular girls made a song: “Yashitty your poo is big and green. Yashitty, you smell like Vaseline.” They sang it around her.

3/ It wasn’t just kids. Her PE teacher joined in — deliberately calling her “Yashitty” during the register and laughing. The whole class laughed with her. Yashi started skipping PE, hiding in the medical room.

4/ She had come to the UK as a child from Mauritius. At 14, after a tearful, angry conversation with her mother, her mother agreed she could change her name if she really wanted to. She didn’t. “I didn’t want the racist bullies to win.”

6/ She unofficially shortened it to “Yashi” at university and has used that as a journalist ever since. But the scars stayed. She suffered from social anxiety - fear that people are laughing at her in groups.

7/ Even as an adult the surname Banymadhub gets comments. One customer service person called it “an interesting collection of letters.” Yashi wanted to reply: this is the name of grandparents and great-grandparents who survived forced displacement, colonisation and indentured labour. I’m proud of it.

8/ She underwent therapy which helped. She realised the problem was never her name — it was racist people. She started calling it out when she saw the same thing done to others (like someone mocking the surname Dixit / Dikshit).

9/ Today she says: “The name that once made me flinch now brings up feelings of compassion for my younger self — and the pride I feel for my heritage keeps me going.” She still answers to Yashi or Yash. She no longer flinches at Yashita.

10/ Ridding yourself of internalised racism is ongoing work. As James Baldwin put it, it requires “vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed” before you can learn to love yourself.

MY VIEW: Kids are kids. You can't blame them for mocking. Growing up in Delhi and Uttar Pradesh, I occasionally got mocked for being a southern Indian. One dark boy, Debashish, used to mock southern Indians as "Dravidians."

I was lucky my name was the northern Indian Rakesh. Had I been Ramanathan or Ayyappan, the nicknames would have come flying at me like tracer bullets.

I was no angel. There was a Mallu boy in my class called Haridas. My classmates would call him Hari Ghaas (green grass) and I would crack up. I would say worse things when we would get into fights during soccer games. He was really dark so he was called Black Dog - after a pirate in Treasure Island. I would laugh every time.

In 2007, a friend who moved to New Zealand changed his son's name from Harshit to Ryan. Back then I thought it was amusing because I felt he was trying to pass off his son as a gora (white). But with a name like Harshit, that boy would have faced hell at school.

Mockery can happen in the reverse direction too. Lund University gets trolled online almost daily by Indians.

Back in the 1950s, when Nargis and Premnath visited Hollywood, they were assigned a guide named John Lund. Nargis would laugh every time he would introduce himself. Once John asked Premnath why the actress was laughing all the time. When Premnath explained why, John got the studio to assign a new guide. And he never showed up after that.

[Bill Gurley @bgurley]

Lots of very smart people are appropriately concerned about regulatory capture from top two AI players. And there are many scary press releases but no real due process.

If OpenAI violated Hugging Face in a way that “demands” new regulation; let’s start with a formal criminal investigation. With a proper third party investigation. And sincere liability.

It can’t be “so super serious” and only analyzed by the defendant. Thats ludicrous.

And why would we write new regulation if the crime we are supposedly protecting against isn’t even prosecuted?

This stuff makes no sense.

[Zakka Jacob @Zakka_Jacob]

First of all, she's not Indian. She's American. Born and raised. You're only rage-baiting your own racist, MAGA trolls against your own wife.
Second of all, I'd hate to be married to a man who compares me to a murderous Pakistani general.

[Rupert Lowe MP @RupertLowe10]

Stop calling them ‘Asian’ ‘grooming gangs’.

They are not Japanese.

Call them what they are.

Predominately Pakistani Muslim rape gangs.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

And this report is just the tip of an enormous iceberg of evil

[Woke Eminent @WokePandemic]

It is astonishing how some "BJP supporters" have turned on Annamalai the moment his resignation was accepted.

The same leader who gave BJP visibility, energy, and a fighting chance in Tamil Nadu is now being called impatient, not a team player, and "nothing without BJP."

Annamalai's contribution to BJP in Tamil Nadu cannot be erased, his but impact remains even he not being in BJP

@annamalai_k

[Sagorika @sagorika_s]

The gall to talk down to the people whose religion is being dissected to purposefully demean and call a social media retaliation to lies an “attack”? Requires intellectual cowardice and it always ends up with appeal to authority and circular citation.

[nisarga @ni5arga]

then how I was able to access production data on that site? all of the mirrors you had under the onmark domain had the same vulnerabilities.

it's sad that you can't even investigate security reports properly. attaching screenshots as proof.

[iMac_too @iMac_too]

Speaker has immense powers. पर इन्हें केवल रोना-धोना करना है ।

[Shiv Aroor @ShivAroor]

Noble but USELESS words by the SC saying "Parents are responsible". Well, this SAME Supreme Court gave bail to Shivani Agarwal, mother of teen Porsche driver, who personally gave her blood to be switched with her drunk son's blood.

Judiciary should stop lecturing the public.

[Shiv Aroor @ShivAroor]

BREAKING⚠️

Gems of Supreme Court!

3 accused in Pune Porsche case GRANTED BAIL by SUPREME COURT. All 3 charged with switching blood samples via bribery. Teen (now adult) driver of Porsche living free life after destroying 2 families.

What an utter shame.
Country for the rich.

[Shefali Vaidya. 🇮🇳 @ShefVaidya]

The day IITs got hijacked by humanities departments was the day their downfall started. Sadly, under the @BJP4India regime, the rot has gotten worse, instead of getting better. @narendramodi ji wants us to focus on quality. How will you get quality when educational institutes are more obsessed with DEI than merit?

[Aishwarya Mudgil @AishwaryakiRai]

The man who rescued Yuvraj's body is subjected to more harassment than duty bound govt officials who refused to help him. Moninder, whose daily pay depends on number of trips he takes will now have to spend his precious time getting harassed by SIT.

[Upamanyu Acharya @upamanyuacharya]

It’s official folks: being Indian is a timing risk abroad.

We don’t realise how far this reputation has travelled until you’re standing at a random bus stop next to your hotel in Fukuoka, Japan at 7:40 a.m., holding a tour voucher, half-awake, trying to look “normal”.

Reporting time: 8:00. Takachiho day tour. Group of 9 friends.

The guide, an elderly Japanese man, starts ticking names off a printed list. Sees mine, nods, then pauses on the next line where it says there are 8 more Indians.

He looks up and asks where the rest are.

I say, “A few minutes” (in my broken Japanese + hand gestures, because obviously).

And he just… laughs. Not rude, not mean. The kind, polite laugh that’s basically disbelief doing customer service. Then he repeats, multiple times, slower each time, like he’s talking to a toddler:

“Bus… leaves… eight… sharp.”

Like, sir, I can hear you. I’m also a person who can read time.

He asks again if I’m sure they’ll come. And again. And again. Each time with this tiny smile that says, “Yeah, I’ve seen this movie.”

And in that moment you realise something slightly grim: you’re not being treated as an individual. You’re being treated as a probability distribution.

Not “Are your friends here?” but “Are Indians capable of this?”

I’m there early. I’m literally the counterexample. Doesn’t matter. The stereotype walks in before you do.

Those 10 minutes between 7:40 and 7:50 were genuinely stressful, because if even ONE person showed up late, it wouldn’t just be “Arre he’s late”.

It would be “Of course they’re late.”

You know that feeling when you’re forced to silently represent 1.4 billion people at 8 a.m. outside a tour bus.

Thankfully, everyone turned up by 7:50.

Not 8:01. Not “almost there”. Not “2 mins”. Properly early.

I gave the guide the smallest, most respectful “I told you so” look possible without getting deported.

He was nice after that. Zero hostility. But the first reaction said everything.

And this is the bit Indians don’t want to admit: people abroad already have a pre-loaded template about us, and it’s not flattering. It’s not just punctuality, either. Punctuality is just the easiest stereotype to express out loud.

So yeah. Make your jokes about “Indian Standard Time” if you want. Just know the world is taking notes, and sometimes you’re the one paying the reputation tax at 7:58 a.m. in rural Japan.

Do we even realise how often we’re being pre-judged like this?

[Muji Singh Rangi @mujifren]

Pradhan Mantri Har Ghar Class Monitor Yojana 😤

[Hindutva Knight @HPhobiaWatch]

Are we overreacting? Does a sexist crass joke require CM, MP, Prime Time reactions?

[Ajeet Bharti @ajeetbharti]

क्या बकलोली है मंडल जी! कई बार पूजा में आयु के कारण या यदि आप पालथी मार कर नहीं बैठ सकते तो आसन ले कर बैठते हैं। इसमें कोई ब्राह्मण नीचे, आदिवासी ऊपर का संदेश नहीं है। जबरदस्ती हर चीज में प्रतीक घुसा कर बाबा साहब ज़िंदाबाद नहीं करना होता।

[Smita Prakash @smitaprakash]

The asteroid will hit earth before a judgement is delivered on this man

[Smita Prakash @smitaprakash]

Thank you Indian consulate Seattle, thank you Prakash Gupta.
Visa is a privilege, not a right. You cannot automatically claim the right to enter a country just by applying for a visa.
IYKYK

[Rahul Raj @x_rahulraj]

Individuals who fled India and settled in America illegally are receiving more respect and support from our politicians than those who live here, pay taxes, and work honestly.

This highlights everything that is wrong in our nation.