From: mmohanv@sancharnet.in
To: mmohanv@sancharnet.in
Subject: FW: article on Oz-see last 2 paras
Date: Fri, 26 Jun 2009 16:48:44 +0530
From: Anil Vartak [mailto:anilvar@yahoo.com]
Sent: Friday, June 26, 2009 4:11 PM
To: undisclosed recipients:
Subject: article on Oz-see last 2 paras
|
Namaste
Pl see the article below. The last 2 paras are quite candid and forthright.
...............It is gladdening though that Indian students have decided to make a noise. Indian community leaders have failed them. And that's partly because there are no Indian leaders with any clout in Australia's political landscape. We have the engineers, the doctors, the IT professionals. We do not have the lawyers, the journalists, the broadcasters, the writers, the film-makers, the political leaders. Indians as migrants prefer that their kids get "good" jobs. And, in the process, they have left it to others to make the important decisions for them. Having decided to make Australia their home, isn't it incumbent on Indians to be involved in the decision-making process? If anything good is to come out of all this, it is to be hoped that the situation will change and that Indians in Australia will engage with the society they have chosen to call their own....
At Home, Down Under Australians are by no means a saintly people. Right from the start, by virtue of being a colony where the detritus of the empire was dumped, Australians are a rough lot. Their treatment of the first Australians, the aborigines, is well-documented. So too are the more contemporary activities of Pauline Hanson. Indeed, Australia's conservative political class has often used race as a wedge to win elections. Refugees from Afghanistan, Muslims, people from the African continent, all of these communities have from time to time been used for political purposes. Contrast this with the idea of multiculturalism. A policy fashioned by a government intent on repudiating the taint of the "white Australia policy". This is the Australia i live in. An Australia that has given Indians every opportunity to improve their lives. Among the many nationalities that have made it here, the Indians stand out in many ways. Most Indians who migrated to Australia in the 1980s and 1990s were professionals. Australia's immigration system saw to that. Immigrants were required to have degrees, facility with the English language and the prospect of getting jobs in their areas of expertise. Most who came then assimilated into Australian society quickly and without fuss. In fact, unlike the Chinese or the Greek communities in Australia, Indians were neither seen nor heard. They shunned publicity. When the Croats and the Serbs brought their war to Australia and occasionally fought each other on the streets, the Indians smirked. Sure they had their sangams and samajs and utsavs but they were also law-abiding citizens of this new homeland. Partly because Indians did not have the numbers like the other communities, partly because they were divided along their own ethnic lines. The Malayalees stayed together, the Punjabis did their own thing, the Gujaratis had their own crowd and so on. All this changed about five years ago. The Australian government discovered the Indian middle class. The education industry began to make money, serious money. Today, Australia earns in excess of $40 billion in education revenue. More than half that amount comes from India where young men and women take out loans to come to Australia for a better life. It's arguable whether they are getting an education, because a majority of them do courses such as commercial cookery, hospitality and so on. Not so that they can work in these fields but so that they can gain permanent residency in the country. This has created a new dynamic. A new breed of Indians is now visible on the streets here. Young, confident, brash and loud. They speak Punjabi, Gujarati, Telugu and other Indian languages in public. They may not know the Australian idiom but that doesn't stop them. They, like all new migrants, work in the lower end of the market. The 7-11's, the petrol stations, the all-night supermarkets, the kitchens of cheap restaurants. They work hard, they work long hours, they live in cheap housing. They are the perfect target for criminal elements. Are these recent attacks on them racist? One wouldn't think so. Statistics tell us that nearly 70 per cent of the attacks are not reported to the police. This is partly because the students do not want their records tainted in any way that would jeopardise their ability to get a permanent visa. Secondly, there are no indications that Indians are being targeted specifically because of their race or colour. Indeed, before the arrival of the Indians in Harris Park in Sydney's west, criminal elements were reportedly attacking old white women. Having said that, one may still argue that the police have not done enough to safeguard this vulnerable section of society. There are several reasons for this, not the least because funding for policing in the area has been declining steadily during the past decade. It is gladdening though that Indian students have decided to make a noise. Indian community leaders have failed them. And that's partly because there are no Indian leaders with any clout in Australia's political landscape. We have the engineers, the doctors, the IT professionals. We do not have the lawyers, the journalists, the broadcasters, the writers, the film-makers, the political leaders. Indians as migrants prefer that their kids get "good" jobs. And, in the process, they have left it to others to make the important decisions for them. Having decided to make Australia their home, isn't it incumbent on Indians to be involved in the decision-making process? If anything good is to come out of all this, it is to be hoped that the situation will change and that Indians in Australia will engage with the society they have chosen to call their own. The writer is manager of an accountancy firm in Sydney. |
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