Every day I travel for work in Bengaluru and meet a lot of people around. I board a bus, I get a question, “K.R.Puram jaatha hai kya?” I nod a yes and say, “Haan, Bhayya”. I go to the local tea/ cigarette vendor in front of my office and he asks me “ninkal 5 rupaai marram ventum?” I really don’t get it, but I still give him 5 rupees change, after all, the sign language exchanges we have. Then my PG cook!!! Oh, he is literally a pain in the ass, he asks “Ashish gaaru, Neti ruchi ela undi?” I give him a sarcastic laugh and say “chala ruchikaramaina”, my next room PG mate speaks to his girlfriend every night. And he sees me coming back from office with a tired look, and he breaks his conversation with her and asks me, “Dinaṭā kēmana gēchē tōmāra?” I just say, “It was awesome!!” Well, it really is, my team in office has Keralites, Tamilians, People from Andra, Bihar, MP, UP, Orissa, Arunachal Pradesh, West Bengal and other places too. In a team of 30, there are 4 Kannadigas including me. I meet people from Bihar, UP, Rajasthan, Kashmir, Delhi, Uttarakhand and other states every day in buses. My PG is owned by a guy from Andra, tea seller outside the office is a Tamilian, and my roommate is a Bengali. This is being qualitative and emotional. Let’s put some facts into it.
Well, this is an old set of statistics. But a fact is a fact, when the population of Karnataka was 5.28 crore (528 lakh) (that was 5 years back), 3.48 crore people spoke Kannada, 36.98 lakh people spoke Telugu, 55.39 lakh spoke Urdu. Karnataka also housed 18.92 lakh people who spoke Marathi and 18.74 lakh people who spoke Tamil. The IT/BT revolution led to an increase in the Hindi-speaking community (13.44 lakh), Konkani-speakers were 7.68 lakhs and the number of Malayalees were 7.01 lakh. Now coming to the V zone
A data gathered from the state home department stated, as on December 31, 2013, there were 421 US nationals, 346 Iranians, 159 Bangladeshi citizens overstaying their visas. During the same time, a total of 3,948 people from 117 different countries were overstaying in the city. Citizens of 4 African countries Congo, Ivory Coast, Sudan and Nigeria and four Asian countries Iran, Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Iraq had topped the list for illegally overstaying foreign nationals. Now coming to the set of legal foreign nationals, US again tops the list with 5,312 citizens in the city followed by Iran with 1,747, Yemen with 1,336 and the Congo republic with 1,232 people. All these people dwell in Bengaluru. Bengaluru has housed 27,782 people belonging to 174 different nationalities. To put a correlation of facts, there are 196 countries in the world. Which means Bengaluru has representatives from 89% of the countries in the world!!! Wait if all this doesn’t matter take this. There are 75 Pakistan nationals living here legally.
And now the exact matter behind writing this open letter. A Tanzanian girl was stripped by a mob of 75-100 people. Well, that is a thing to condemn. It is really unjustifiable. But that mob numbered less than the number of Pakistanis staying in the city. Shame on you media. SHAME ON YOU!! The manufacturing news is not a big deal for you people, but living in harmony is a big thing for us. Just let us have it. In an ill fitted mentality to cook up stories which generate TRP, don’t please call Bengaluru a racist city or India Intolerant. This is not something that you should use to generate media outrage. A common man has no problem out here. Well “THE COMMON MAN” is treated here!! What more do you expect from us? Now the population of the city is 11.5 million. That is a large number. The mob doesn’t represent Bengaluru, neither does it depict “Racism”. And there is no reason to have hashtags like “#SHAMEOFBENGALURU.” So mainstream media and the representatives who feature in it, go home you are drunk!!! Damn! I wonder if you ever get ashamed of yourself.
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