People

I decided to move this to the People thread since I dislike Pit Bulls.

There are almost no Jews in India. The population was already tiny in the 40s but dwindled even more after Israel was created. Almost all of them left for Israel, Jews not being very popular in India. I read they currently number 5000 in a country of almost 1.8 billion.

You didn’t ask this but I have a quiet afternoon and feel like typing irrelevant nonsense. I look like an Indian but my roots are in Malaysia and go back a couple of hundred years there. One of my grandparents and two of my great grandparents were Dutch but that’s a shameful family secret we don’t talk about.

Malaysia has three racial groups, the Muslim Malays who are the native majority, the brown Malaysians (immigrants from India/Indonesia/Burma/etc. all of whom look Indian) and the Chinese (immigrants from China, HK, Taiwan etc.).

The browns and Chinese were wildly successful and owned all the businesses. The Muslim Malays not so much. This state of affairs being unpleasant for the Muslims, in 1969, they had a revolution and declared Islam the state religion, made it illegal for non-Malays to hold public office, be police officers or teachers or almost anything else employed by government.

My family were brown and were immediately rendered second class citizens in Malaysia. Some of them stayed and have been very successful economically, despite being second class citizens. Most left, many for the UK, many for Australia, a few for Canada and the Dutch wing settled in Austria (having the good sense to not want to return to the Godless Netherlands). We don’t hate them but we don’t talk to them because they’re Dutch. We have our standards. All of the family have been quite successful whether they stayed in Malaysia or emigrated.

I have never seen a Jew in Malaysia which is unsurprising, but I’ve also only seen a tiny handful in all of South America which is surprising to me. I’ve also seen almost no Chinese in South America. Tons of brown people though, albeit usually racially different from Malaysian brown people even though the skin colour is almost identical.

I left Malaysia at age 4, my parents having had the good sense to get the hell out. I will be forever grateful to them for making that courageous move. We’ve done well in Canada, which I consider my only home. I do not hate Malaysia but it is not my country.