Watch: What if someone from the North-East poked fun at 'mainland Indian' stereotypes?
“All of you guys really look alike. I don’t want to be racist but it’s the eyes.”
Indians from the North-Eastern states have long faced prejudices of being stereotyped on the basis of twisted perceptions of people from elsewhere in the country.
What if the tables were turned, though, and those same people had to be at the receiving end of uninformed, insensitive questions?
That’s just what the video above does to drive home the point about how obnoxious the generalisations made about Indians from the North-Eastern are.
Recalls Merenla Imsong from Nagaland, “A person once told me: ‘Konichiwa Akira Kurosawa (Japanese director). What’s your name Miss sushi? Mary? Mary Kom?’ When I told him that he was being racist, he retorted, ‘How dare you call me racist.’”
And so Imsong turns the tables with gentle satire, giving the stereotypers something to ponder on.
She takes a jibe at the way names from the North-Eastern states are brushed aside as “complicated”. So, she tells a Mukesh Kejriwal: “I’ll just call you moo.”
Her tongue-in-cheek presumptions show what it’s like to not to be considered individuals and to be pigeonholed despite an immense diversity in culture.
“I have been asked if I can speak ‘Nagalandi’. This may sound funny but not when you get deeper into the facts,” Imsong told Scroll.in.
She currently works as an assistant designer in Mumbai and balances her work with comedy and theatre.
