00:00Go to Nepal, they say, as if our language is a suitcase we packed from across a border.
00:05As if speaking Nepali makes our blood foreign.
00:08But thousands speak in Bengali and no one points them to Bangladesh.
00:13So why us?
00:14These lines were written after what happened in Silikuri, a city in northern West Bengal, on August 5th.
00:21Four Nepali students were attacked in their own home.
00:24Not with fists, but with words and with a hammer.
00:30Two sisters, Leela and Ruby Datta, allegedly barged into their apartment, banged on the windows, hurled sexist and racist abuses and threatened physical harm.
00:46One of the Agri's students, Ronita Lama, filed a police complaint.
00:50She said, this wasn't the first time.
00:52It was the third such attack in a month.
00:55All of them lived in a rented apartment in Silikuri's Hakimpara neighborhood.
00:58Their landlord, Pankaj Thakur, bagged the students.
01:02He called the police himself.
01:03The two sisters were arrested.
01:05A case has been filed.
01:07But what they said to the students, let this Kalingpal resident to share this video on her Instagram.
01:12Why are we always the watchman, always the Bahadur?
01:15As if that is how we were meant to be or want to be.
01:20Yes, some stood at your gates.
01:23But have you never heard of the poets, the professors, the doctors, the dancers, the soldiers who died for this land with the language you still mock?
01:30Did you forget, Nepali was included in the aid schedule of the Indian constitution in 1992?
01:37It is not foreign.
01:39It is recognized.
01:40It is ours.
01:42And did you forget Captain Rajesh Thapa, who died fighting terrorists in Jammu and Kashmir?
01:48Only 27 years old when he gave up his life so that you could sleep peacefully at night.
01:54He didn't ask if this land would ever call him his son.
02:01He just protected it anyway.
02:04We are from a place where you come to breathe, where you come to escape the choking heat of your cities,
02:11to sip tea in our silence, to stare at the face of Kanchan Janka and pretend it smiled only at you.
02:19You wake up at dawn for Tiger Hill, photograph the sunrise we grew up with,
02:24and then leave.
02:26You visit Tiger's house in Kalimpong, not noticing it, this crumbling like the respect you forgot to show.
02:33So why do you ask us?
02:35Are you even Indian?
02:37Yes, we are.
02:38In every storm of these streets, in every song of the soil, in every name on a war memorial,
02:45in every tongue you refuse to listen to, we are Indians.
Be the first to comment