A couple of weeks ago, I came across a news piece regarding an Indian guy who was arrested in the UK after an online vigilante group against pedophilia monitored his activities in grooming underage “girls” (the vigilante group members posing as girls, for those who are not familiar with their modus operandi) and caught him red-handed while trying to meet up with one. I hope I need not elaborate on what he had hoped the meeting would lead to. Anyway, good for the many girls who might have become his prey, he was arrested. The news contained details that he was from some North Indian state and that he had been in the UK for just 12 weeks before he got arrested.
Right on cue, a number of my fellow Malayali saints jumped into the comments section of the news and poured out their feelings about how this must be some guy from “UP” and how only they end up doing abhorrent acts like this. There was inevitably a lot of chest thumping on the superiority of Kerala and Malayali people. It took me back to not one, but three different news pieces involving Malayali men in the UK.
The first was an employee of the Citi Group in England, a father of one, who, in 2017, just happened to have condoms in his bag when he went to meet up with an underage girl who he had been sexting with extremely explicit messages of what he would like to do to her when he met her. This, after the “girl” repeatedly informed him that she was a minor, in response to his creepy question, “How young are you?” According to him, he just “wanted to have lunch with her.” Right bro! While watching the video of his confrontation was embarrassing, to put it mildly, it broke my heart to think of what his wife went through when this news got splashed across the Internet and what she would tell her infant child someday about why daddy was not in their lives – assuming that she had the sense to leave this asshole.
In 2020, another Malayali, who went to the UK to do his BBA, got arrested for the very same crime in the very same modus operandi. And only 5 months back, a Malayali got arrested for continued stalking of a woman despite multiple restraining orders, which he kept breaking. If these are not enough, I personally know a Malayali who was arrested on the grounds of trying to groom a minor in the US many years ago.
Despite all this, our people think it is okay to gloat online about how a Malayali, anywhere in the world, can do no wrong. This trend is pretty common in people from multiple states in India, to be fair. Even the North Indian belt definitely has its way of saying how “converted criminals” from Kerala would do this when “sacred” North Indians won’t. I just read some comments on the same lines two minutes back – so don’t even think about arguing with me here. And I found it hilarious that these two sections are very happy to turn a blind eye to disgraceful acts involving someone from their own community/location, but, at the same time, slam a person from another community/location for the very same crime.
Why I have focused on the “Malayali superiority” assholery here is because while the others try to bring out their superiority, they do not try to mask their stupidity – they sound proudly stupid. But our people have to put on the mask of the “highly literate,” “well-read,” “knowledgeable” saints from the state with the “highest literacy rate.” If I had a penny for every time my people have used the “highest literacy rate” nugget to justify absolutely stupid remarks against people from another place, with an annoying, smug, know-it-all air, I would be very rich indeed right now.
As I have written time and again, this smugness HAS TO end at some point. Literacy is in no way a free pass to be a complete asshole, and using education and literacy towards that end truly shows that the ones who do that do not understand the basic purpose of education. So the next time they see news pieces of crimes done by someone from another state, I hope they will think of the idiots from their own state who go abroad and shame our entire country – and keep their disgusting, divisive comments to themselves.
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Also published on Medium.
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