Hindi Medium, When I saw the title of movie, I knew the film is talking about education in India. The protagonist Raj is the son of a tailor who lives in an old neighborhood. His family is not poor, but still not rich. When Raj grew up, he fell in love with Mitu, a beautiful girl from the same social class, then they married as they wished. Years later, Raj has become a well-known fashion merchant, and got his own brand and design studio, living a wealthy life, and is a well-deserved husband and father. When the daughter reached the age of school, the couple tried various means to get their daughter to enter top prestigious elementary school in Delhi. They even moved to the slums to pretend to be poor people, just to defraud the school. In the slum, Raj met the kind and honest family of Yahim. Yahim’s sincere dedication made Raj’s shocked. He saw the darkness and the nature of education, and Raj realized that the education system in India is so unfair. Raj eventually gived up sending his child to the prestigious school, instead, he sent his daughter to a normal public school, near his home.
In the film, it exposed the inequality between poor people and rich people, and the unfairness between these two classes in India. Moreover, in India, it seems that English is not just a language, but a status symbol, maybe we can give it a name as lingual discrimination. If someone speak English instead of Hindi, the society pays more respect to him. Raj speaks Hindi, and his wife Mitu speaks English. it is love that allows them to cross the class. I once heard someone says that Indians like to speak English, though grammatical errors are endless. This shows that the phenomenon of India’s class division is very serious and the gap between rich and poor is very large, even languages are classified. The greatest success of this film is that the director made very heavy topics in a relaxed and humorous way, though this film involves education, class, family, system, etc.
The crescendo of the whole film is the speech Raj made at the end. The speech was quite wonderful, Raj confessed a series of shameful deeds he had done to get his daughter into a prestigious school, and also revealed the ugly face of the wife of the headmaster. Usually after such kind of speech in a film, there will be thunderous applause; however, this movie broke the convention, only Raj’s wife applauded for him, and then they quietly left. This is what the movie showed us, a serious and true attitude, because in our real life, the social barriers and cognitions actually cannot be eliminated by just a sincere speech.
The film just showed the audience of the unfairness and inequality of the education system and social classes, and I think it is great deeds for us to try our best to help eliminate such unfairness.
Qihang: Hello, ladies and gentlemen, today’s podcast is the topic “Yo is this racist?”
Peidong: There are a wide variety of types of racism around the world against different groups of people, and what we are talking about today is something very common recently in the US, Stop Asian Hate.
Qihang: Do you know that just a few weeks ago, a Chinese student in our university made a speech in Columbus to appeal to people to pay attention to the problem of Aisan Hate? It is really a passionate speech!
Peidong: I actually have no idea at all, but I do notice that racism against Asians has become a lot more severe recently which is terrifying. There are a load of hashtags trending on Twitter that ask people to assault the Asians they see.
Qihang: Yep, I have heard some of this. And during the quarantine, this phenomena has become intensified, since many of the Americans think that it is Asians, especially the Chinese brought the corona-virus to the US. Also, as I heard from my friends, someone threw eggs to a Chinese student in our school on High-street. When I first heard of this, it really riled me up.
Peidong: I can’t believe something like this is still happening these days. The reason why the US has been one of the strongest countries in the world is that the US is a big melting pot. It contains talented people from all over the world building and improving the US altogether. The minorities have done significant contributions to the country and should never be treated like this because after all, we are all humans.
Qihang: Yep, I agree with you! As there are different kinds of people in America, people should t
reat every person equally, regardless of gender, race or sexual orientation. And I just saw a report last week that an Asian was beaten into a coma on the subway. The video was uploaded to Tik-Tok, and received about 1.6 million views. I was confused about the reason for the abuser to hit the poor Asian, and the most shocking thing is that many American did not sympathize with the Asian, instead, they blamed him for saying N-word to the black person. It is so puzzling.
Peidong: Well, if he did say the word then I think he deserved it. Racism is unacceptable under any circumstances.
Qihang: Not really, when the NYPD was collecting evidences about what was actually going on at that moment, most people who were there claimed that it was probably a robbery and attempted murder. The truth is that in some Asian languages, there are lots of words’ pronunciations that sound like N-words. Take a step back, there is no sign showing that the Asian said the N-word or anything similar. Most people are just guessing without solid evidence on social media.
Peidong: There was also a shooting recently which led to the deaths of eight people while six of them are Asians. After taking the suspect in custody, the spokesman of the police department said it was “a really bad day for him”. This is unacceptable and disrespectful for the victims. Humanizing a murderer equals becoming a murderer. There should be no excuse for a murderer committing such crime. I had my bad days and I didn’t even think of murdering anyone. This is clearly an systemic injustice.
Qihang: Yep, it is so true that bad mood cannot be the reason for murdering others! Also the police should find out what actually happened on that day, and then judge the whole event. It is impenetrable that the police were trying to exculpate the murderer. Regardless of who is the murderer, and who were killed in the murder, the result is that eight families were utterly destroyed from this murderer’s hand.
Peidong: The suspect chose all of his targets in Asian spas and that is no coincidence whic
h means he chose the Asian spas on purpose instead of the local ones. The police department should pay more attention to the motivation of the suspects instead just saying he’s in a bad mood.
Qihang: Well, as I expected, this sheriff is an anti-Asian, and some people found the evidence from his twitter, on April 2nd, 2020, he sent a tweet. In this tweet, there was a picture, and in the picture, it was a T-shirt with slogan ”COVID-19 Imported virus from CHY-NA”, as I know, CHY-NA is the disparage call to China. Moreover, the reason that the sheriff used to exculpate the suspect is so ridiculous. He said that the Spas which the murderer chose are not certificated. However, even if the Spas are not certificated, could it be the reason for the suspect to kill the innocent people?
Peidong: I don’t think so. I believe the recent racism against Asians are highly related to Covid-19. What people need to realize is that the virus doesn’t originate from China. The virus does affect our lives a lot, but the virus itself is the world’s common enemy. It is unreasonable to blame it on Asians since all people can be infected without vaccination. Furthermore, hate is a scarier virus that spreads around people. It is a lot more deadly for a country in the long run.
Qihang: Yep, though the COVID-19 is a horrible virus, it can be prevented by vaccination in the future, since it is just a physical disease. However, the hatred among people is much more fearful than the virus, since once the prejudice among people has formed, it would be so hard to eliminate such prejudice, and our offspring will continue this hatred generation by generation.
Peidong: Yes, the Asians living in the US are also Amiercans. Many people think of them as the Others instead of the One which is very wrong. These Asians are living in the same society, speaking the same language, paying the same taxes shouldn’t be considered as Others in any ways. Even people can look different, we are all human beings. We, the human beings are a One as a whole. Covid-19 is the enemy that we should fight together instead of others who simply don’t look the same as you do.
Qihang: It is true.Under the current situation, people should come together and treat the virus as a common enemy, solving this problem is an urgent affair by now. This is Qihang, thanks for listening to our podcast!
Peidong: Thanks for listening and this is Peidong.
COVID-19 is a popular topic in during the last whole year, and it really influenced the people aorund the world so much. Some people says that the virus is not only a virus, it is also a mirror which reflected the real feature of people and the expose the evil of the society. Moreover, many injustices in the society are also exposed during the time. In India, sexual discrimination is always a serious problem, it has existed for a long time, because of the regime of the country, and during the pandemic, this unfairness has been amplified. Here I would like to talk about a piece of news which is about such unfairness in India.
Months ago, I read about a piece of news from the internet, which tells that an Indian woman was imprisoned in a small room of about two square meters, just because she is suspected of having the COVID-19. For about fifty days, this poor woman could not stay with her children, or see her husband, and the most ridiculous thing is that the woman’s family asked the government for an explanation, but the government could only tell that the hosipital made a mistake. Meanwhile, many men who were detected as having coronavirus could receive regular treatment, and would not be imprisoned in any guradhouse.
I was shocked when I heard about the news. I know that women in India has very poor social status, but I cannot believe that the government can be so unfair when facing lives. No matter how low is Indian women’s social status, during the pandemic, everyone should be treated the same, since people should gather to resist the virus. Also, I have heard that India has the highest rate of rape in the world a long time ago, but the government had never tried to change such situation.
From many news and hearsay I have heard, I see that women are oppressed in every aspect in India. It is not a trend phenomenon, but a bad influence left over from the long Indian history; therefore, it is very hard to change the males’ attitude towards the females in India, these years, crimes took place on women had not decreased but increased; in another word, the government did nothing on improving the situation. If the government can call on the people to protect the rights of women and contribute to gender equality, the Indian society will become more harmonious, fewer and fewer women will suffer from the sexual discrimination, and the systemetic injustice will be eliminated day by day.
It took nearly six years for Mohsin Hamid to finish the book, The Reluctant Fundamentalist. After the book was published, Hamid’s profound thinking on September 11 Attack, the border conflict between India and Pakistan, and the cultural conflict between the East and the West, has made a great impact in the western countries. First, we should know about fundamentalism, since it is the main topic we would like to discuss about here. Fundamentalism is a concept in many religions around the world. It refers to some certain religious groups which try to return to their original beliefs, or make it strictly abiding to the basic principles of their religion by some collective movements.
The fundamentalists believe that the liberal theology that emerged in the religions in modern times has made their beliefs secularized and deviated from the essence of their beliefs. They generally advocated literal and traditional interpretations of the basic scriptures or documents of their religions, and believe that the doctrines gained from these interpretations should be applied to all aspects of social, economic, and political life. Fundamentalism exists not only in Islam, though it is discussed in the book, but in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and some other religions.
Among all of the religions, fundamentalism has become the most important trend of thoughts in the Islamic world today, compared with any other mainstream religions in the world, and is widely supported in many Islamic worlds. Many Muslims believe that the modern world is affected by secularization and westernization, and is not in line with their beliefs. Therefore, the Islamic fundamentalists try to return to the original state of their beliefs and strictly manage their personal and social life according to the Koran. Moreover, as many of the Arab terrorists generally had islamic fundamentalist religious backgrounds, fundamentalism started to have a negative meaning.
The Iranian hostage crisis was a turning point of the term, fundamentalism. The western media tried to explain ruholrah Mousavi Khomeini’s ideology and the Islamic revolution in Iran to the audience; therefore, the media described it as “Islamic fundamentalism”, similar to the “Christian fundamentalism” in the United States, and after that, “Islamic fundamentalism” has become a common term for subsequent use.
