Shouldn’t you NOT be swearing in church? Since we are tempting you to such awful sin, I’m shutting this thread down.

If you’re telling the truth, my apologies to such a long-time reader; we welcome everyone, especially those who follow the rules. If you happen to be part of the ONE CASE where two people are sharing an IP and engaging in behavior that was previously displayed ONLY by trolls, then as I said earlier, I’ll happily eat my words. Until then, I’m not changing anything about my approach to moderating this space– if we hadn’t done so in this fashion, you wouldn’t have stuck around for two years. Peace.

that definitely skews my observations but then again–they are anecdotal. there really isn’t any reliable social research to suggest that those characteristics apply to the whole population.

That’s the least judgmental thing I’ve read in a long time.

I grew up in a community populated by majority reform-jew hippies who moved to rural Virginia, had kids and followed a brown guru. My childood friends all had sanksrit or Tamil names, prayed to Vishnu/Krishna/Siva/Brama (as well as Christ, Allah, G-D, Ahura Mazda and who knows else), believed in the common currency of all religions, devalued material possessions as a measure of social worth and, for the most part, did not partake in legal or illegal drugs.

after moving out, and encountering many brown people, i found, for the most part, people who were contemptuous, and often ignorant, of the multifarious nature of Hinduism (mostly the importance of oral tradition and lifestyle over dogma and doctrine), had cutesy anglicized names, could not conceive of 10 minutes without starbucks or a lifetime without Coach/Fendi/Prada/Chanel bags and the possibility of being a non-judgemental teetotaller.

And to go back to your original point, if we start picking differences, my neighbors back in India were different in every one of those ways. The ethnic, historical and linguistic differences existed. Hell every person I have known in my life has a different background, but we do have a lot in common as compared to people who are not from the sub-continent. Care to refute?

Look, by dint of my upbringing (anybody raised in an american ashram…anybody?…still waiting…”) my bharatanatyam teaching mother (not a hobbyist but one who did only that) i think i can see more than a few similarities. I just refuse to refer to myself as anything but a sri-lankan tamil when asked for easy-to-remember group identifiers.

You BOTH decide to start commenting on the same day, from the same IP? What a convenient coincidence. The burden of proof isn’t on me, my potential new friends. I’m not the one potentially trying to cloak “shady” so cleverly. If what you say is true, you’ll be back, you may even log on from home, from other IPs, you’ll continue to engage, because you’re in the right and I’m so very wrong. Now please prove me wrong or do troll elsewhere. We have more than enough poo to clean from the monkeys, as it is.