Meenakshi Menon

Christians singing the Israeli national anthem in a church. I love this. 🙏🖤

His name was Srinivas Kuchibhotla. Born in Hyderabad. His parents called him Srinu. He came to America in 2006 for his master's. Graduated with a 3.85 GPA. Worked his way up from software engineer to aviation programs manager at Garmin in Kansas. His manager said one thing about him. Top of his class kind of guy. He built a home in Kansas with his wife. Painted the walls himself. Installed the garage door himself. A few weeks before he died, they had a doctor's appointment. They were trying to start a family. He would have turned 33 on March 9. On February 22 2017, he and his friend Alok stopped at a bar after work to watch a basketball game. An ordinary Wednesday evening. A man there had been watching them for weeks. Told others they looked like terrorists. That night, he walked up to their table. Poked Srinivas in the chest. Demanded to know their immigration status. Shouted get out of my country. Other patrons threw him out. He drove home. Got his gun. Changed his shirt so nobody would recognise him. Came back. He fired eight rounds. Srinivas died that night. As the killer fled, he told someone he had just killed two Iranians. Srinivas was Indian. From Hyderabad. Eleven years in America. Not one complaint against him. Not one rule broken. His mother had asked him many times to come back if he ever felt unsafe. He always told her he was safe. His body came home to Hyderabad in a coffin. His mother wailed as it was carried through the streets in a flower laden carriage. She said she would not allow her younger son to go back to America. His father said whatever was destined has happened. The killer got three life sentences. Srinivas got a funeral at 32. He did everything right. Degree. Visa. Job. Taxes. Never raised his voice at anyone. None of it was enough. His name was Srinivas Kuchibhotla. Every Indian in the US deserves to know it.

After the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, Queen Victoria decreed a pact of 'non-interference' where the British would desist from interfering in Indian religious & social affairs. However this has an unintended side effect - a massive one in fact: British authorities now needed to classify what exactly was Indian religion, custom, & tradition. This was a process of calcification & (mis)categorization. Many of those who assisted them were urbane or Anglophilic Brahmins who declared practices as non-Hindu/non-orthodox even though more observant or rural Brahmins would engage in them all the same. That is not to mention the hamfisted lines drawn in front of other Hindu communities whose customs fell beyond the pale of what the interlocutors deemed as 'Hindu.' For the British, this was a boon. This complemented their burgeoning ethno-caste anthropological project that served as the foundation of a legal code which treated castes & communities differently in manners frequently based off their fealty to the Empire. So it is here where we see a simultaneous botched deconstruction of Hinduism and Frankenstein-esque rearrangement of a new body of Indian religion for the purposes of the Raj.