The Ugly American has long been a prototype - loud, boorish and insensitive to the culture of others. Now Madhu Raju has become the epitome of the “Ugly Indian Abroad” on the internet.
This is Sandip Roy.
Raju, an Indian origin engineer in the USA, went viral much to his own detriment when he made a reel with a woman dancing at the World War II Memorial in Washington DC.
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The internet slammed him for disrespecting the ambience of a war memorial that too in a time when the US was at war in Iran. Latest reports suggest Raju, an engineer, might be deported if he is found to have been making money off his dance studio in Dallas alongside his IT job, something not allowed on his H1-B visa.
The video provoked sharp reactions. At a time when the USA has been cracking down on immigrants this seemed like an act on provocation, to disrespect the sanctity of a war memorial in one’s host country, an act both foolish and foolhardy.
But others dug out videos of Americans doing similar things and asked whether the backlash on Raju wasn’t just racist. For example, it was two American brothers who were arrested in Thailand in 2017 for deciding to take a butt selfie at the Wat Arun temple in Bangkok. At least Raju and his companion kept their clothes on.
Raju who deleted his social media profiles has not explained why he chose the War Memorial for his reel but it’s hard to believe he could have been unaware of the significance of his locale. What’s actually more significant is he wasn’t just dancing. He was apparently doing something called the “Don’t Rush” dance on TikTok.
The story isn’t really about the Ugly Indian abroad. It’s about the desperation to go viral on social media. The War Memorial becomes just a backdrop, nothing more. In fact, the more unlikely the backdrop the more the chances a reel has to stand out from the pack and thus go viral. It’s social media’s version of shock and awe.
Recently I went to the Alipore Museum in Kolkata, which used to be a jail. It features cells that housed freedom fighters. It also still has the gallows where freedom fighters were hanged. But soon the gallows had to be placed out of bounds from visitors because too many were sticking their heads in the noose and making funny reels.
We clearly live in a world where everything has become fodder for clickbait content. As the Iran War erupted recently I noticed a slew of memes poking fun at the events in the Middle East, including the assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei. At first I was rather impressed at the speed with which people came up with those memes. There have been LEGO recreations of his compound being destroyed and Khamenei as an action figure. The White House itself posted videos using jokes from Top Gun and Dragon Ball Z with the caption “Wake up, Daddy’s Home” as if what was happening in Iran was a video game rather than a war.
But as they kept coming it made me wonder about the meme-fication of the news.
One does not have to be fan of the Ayatollah but is the assassination of top religious leader really the subject of memes? In a short attention span world we do not have the time to read a real analysis of the implications of the attack on Iran, the tangled history of US meddling in Iranian affairs that led to the Ayatollahs coming to power and the irony of the son of the late Shah of Iran being heralded as some kind harbinger of democracy when his father’s secret police was notorious for its brutal crushing of dissidents. But such analysis consumes time. A meme is time pass..
At one time we complained that people did not want to read in-depth stories. News had to be compressed into a paragraph or less. Maybe just into a headline. But now not even that. News must be turned into a meme. The news is just fodder for memes.
But perhaps that is the point. In a world that seems to be spinning out of control, the meme might be our coping strategy. We are not really laughing at what’s happening but at our own helplessness.
As one poplar meme during the Iran war shows - we are being encouraged to sip our soda with a soggy paper straw to save the planet while the leaders of the world seem to not care about kicking off World War III.
This is Sandip Roy for KALW