Why do maharashtrians have light eyes

Is it the one with the Indian passport? Can it be the person who is Indian at heart, without that vital piece of paper, living abroad but who cares enough to eagerly switch on an Indian television channel for the latest news from India, every single day? Can it be the person who has never been to India yet carries forward our Indian values and celebrates his or her Indian-ness, generation after generation? As endless questions invade my mental space, confusion, intrigue and fascination abound.

But one thought stands clear and that is to never judge a book by its cover. But until then, as we continue to label people by their nationality, I am tempted to say that a real Indian will always support India in an international cricket match! Spotlight Blockchain a game changer for seed funding? Naima said:. What group is from the beautifull Freda Pinto? Ajanbahu Ad Honorem. Jun 4, India.

Theseus said:. They are from Karnataka which is in south India. Rosi Historum Emeritas. Jul 6, Ajanbahu said:. She is a Catholic from Mangalore, these people are admixture between Portuguese and tribal fishermen. Rosi said:. Not necessarily. Just because one is a convert does not mean they have Portuguese blood in them. And anyway, relevant to this thread Pinto does not qualify as a "fair-skinned Indian. They are usually Konkani Maharashtrians though, and generally Hindus Brahmins, to be specific.

Last edited: Sep 7, I agree that not all converts are of Portuguese origin but we have to look at population of Goa, it is 1. I highly doubt that Hindu Brahmins would marry foreigners like the Portuguese. I was, in his words, basically white.

I reacted swiftly and furiously. I asked him what he imagined it meant to be Indian: someone who bobbed his head around imitating a bhangra dancer or spoke ad nauseam about his love for Bollywood?

Or, perhaps a former spelling-bee champion or engineer? What I didn't let on that day was that I was wracked with guilt. I'd accomplished precisely what my childhood had conditioned me to want: I was, in essence, being considered white.

Though the communities I encountered in New Jersey and in college were overwhelmingly different in makeup, the same, suffocating standard of beauty persisted.

The outcome felt nauseating. Only then did I understand how acutely I'd absorbed the colorism I encountered in these communities. When my childhood wish came true, it didn't feel like a victory; it tasted bitter.

I had erased a vital part of myself. I live in New York, now. When people ask about my background, I'll either say I'm "mostly Bengali," or that I'm mixed.

The latter feels like a bit of a cop-out, a way of flattening my family's messy history into a word. But the truth is that I'm still untangling my feelings about that messy history. Well after his death, I learned that the Barisal my grandfather knew was a theater of colonial terror. British forces who dwelled there would routinely, and with swift force, suppress Bengali independence movements.

There is a part of myself for which I'll never have the full story. This history runs through my blood. My blue-eyed grandfather was the unlucky inheritor of the brutal way history unfolded in that particular time and place.

I only wish the circumstances of his life, shuffled around from a young age in such a politically volatile period, hadn't made him so tight-lipped about his own story. Shortly after graduating college in , my curiosity prompted me to take a DNA test. I'm working through what that number means: the colonial cruelty it implies, who it suggests that paternal ancestor was.

Was he violent and terrible, as I've been taught to imagine so many British imperialists were? One thing the test confirms is that there is indeed a part of myself for which I'll never have the full story. Knowing this isn't an automatic corrective to my jumbled feelings, but it has given me some measure of resolve to embrace my identity and my features, both white and Bengali aspects of them.

This mental shift doesn't happen overnight. But these days, when I face the mirror, I don't wish that I'd been born a white man. I see a bit of my mother, a woman with a dusky complexion. I see traces of my grandfather, a man with a sharp nose like mine. I stare silently at my features, hoping that one day, I'll be able to read their histories as mine. Mayukh Sen is the editorial director at This.

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