When FOBs Attack
Pream Anandarajah, clean cut and Toronto born, slides down low in the passenger seat. He looks cautiously over his right shoulder at a group of students gathered near his high school.
“That’s them,” he says, referring to the FOBs.
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on Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007, 6:11 pm in Brown › 
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Hoarding
god this is scary. The term fob now being used as in a derogatory way. (I’m sure it has been in the past… but I think the violence attached to the situation is new, correct me if I’m wrong) I mean, maybe it does start with the white-washed kids like me who just enjoy “fob-humor”
(N.B. there actually was a slight tamasha with this post when a now friendly blogger poked some fun at it on another brown blog that begins with a “u”, he thought it was something like “101 ways to spot a FOB”… I cleared things up with the following response:
)
Anyway, as someone who was born in the the states and has been going to school in Canada for the past three years, I’ve most definitely noticed a difference in the immigrant populations and how they assimilate or isolate themselves from the rest of their respective communities. It’s interesting to see the differences, and scary when the above situations occur….
Hilarious. Two insecure, ill-defined, amorphous social groups fighting for sanctuary under an umbrella-term that is anyway derided by a larger, relatively native, group. I’m googlewhacking for “Fractallian Idiocy”.
I see trollerboi (see sidebar) and th.com have the same sources!
The pro-tiger emotions seem to run equally strong in certain TO municipalities, and while that influence is not overt in this case, I do believe the violent precedents to the Tamil immigration has a role to play in the youth mindset.
I have lived in two Tamil Tiger hotbeds - Markham and Parkdale. This incident occurred in the Markham area. That area is a suburbian nightmare - cookie cutter housing with few communal areas within walking distance, no trees, and bleak arterial roads fenced off at all ends. Streets are clean, but for stark, ghoulishly bare saplings placed in orderly distance from one another, and sprays of plastic grocery bags caught in fencing. Think Fremont CA. Parkdale on the other hand is high density. Shops overflowing onto the sidewalk, people walking from school to home to grocery store to hospital. You are forced to interact. Look the other person in the eye. It makes for a society where you can not alienate yourself and get lost into your posse’s mindset. The problem is not one of immigrants, but of city planning. I would also cast a little blame onto the herd mentality pervasive among new immigrants that property possession is critical, even if it comes at the cost of human interaction, a twenty year monetary obligation to the bank, and life in a suburban hole that is large but so lacking in humanity.
Interaction! That’s what it’s about. Do the planet a favor. Reach out and touch someone different today (in a sense that is legal and/or moral).
I have noticed that in canada 2 desi groups are involved in crime, they are punjabis and tamils.
In US this does not exist in a pronounced way(sure if you dig hard enough you will find em here too).
In the U.S.: Punjabis and Afghans in Fremont, Malayalees in Houston.
To GGK: The honors dont go to punjabis and tamils alone. ‘Ethnic’ gangs in Canada have also formed among the chinese, the italians, the vietnamese, the jamaicans, the french separatists etc. Then there are the biker gangs that are loosely affiliated with specific provinces.
On another sad note, there was a child shot dead in a school today in TO. (The story is lnked from my site and I’ve pasted a map of the area as well). That area is typical of the model I had described - a non-walking neighborhood.
trollerboi: my comment was about desi gangs not gangs in general and the difference in attitudes between US and Canada.
I dont buy the urban planning hypothesis. Immigrants as new arrivals have lived in lower cost housing, near other immigrants.
There is a camaraderie amongst people making similar transition but posse relations are preversions that they create.
GGK - Still, my point was that the environment has a strong role to play in the behavior of the residents. Jane Jacobs, the urban philosopher wrote of it very articulately when she spoke of streets that encourage pedestrians in neighborhoods. Contemporary urban planners are re-discovering this (as a general Internet search using variations of +streets +urban planning +pedestrian traffic suggests). On a personal level - As an outsider looking in, I find SF to be much more refreshing than LA for the same reason. Even the dreaded Tenderloin district is far more appealing than a walk on the car-friendly blighted LA streets.
It’s a hypothesis, and I wont be dogmatic about it because this is just an emotional gut reaction to certain city environments. Hence the thoughts I shared.
Trollerboi:
I dont know what kind of belief other than mental environment that would lead to crime over an insult.
As I said you dont see other desi communities not pulling this kind of shit.
My hypothesis is the parents(and their attitude towards such behavior) is the cause of the behavior not buildings and roads.
1000000s of people worldwide want to live in such environments and not engage in posse behavior (or intellectually pusillanimous behaviours on blaming city planners from generations past).
This news is so upsetting..it seems like some kind of media brand war between modern and premodern aesthetic sensibilities…and people are just the metropolitan robots playing out this idiotic apocalypse…I guess its strange reading about it from India…where I live…and where I guess there are parallels to the kind of FOB humour I’m reading about…except here its more to do with class discrimination…I guess parts of NRI culture have travelled and become normalized in certain pockets of metropolitan India….here the term you might hear about to describe someone who looks/acts like a FOB is “Local”….as in “What a bloody local..yaar..” …which suggests provinciality, illiteracy, bad english, middle-lower middle class taste in clothes- etc. So its no better off over here than it is there.
The violence you describe reminds of of something a Tibetan friend told me about Dharamsala…where the new immigrants from Tibet are coming from a culture which is currently suffering from problems with gang violence and hard drugs (sort of a similar situation that america faced when the US govt. let all the drug barons bring their drugs into poor black communities so the youth would get addicted to smack and forget to start a revolution…I guess the same principal is being played out by the Chinese Govt. to neutralize Tibetan youth struggles. ) So Anyway there’s a lot of violence and friction happening in Dharamsala between these communities….where the kids who have been born and raised in India identify with Indian mainstream popular culture like Bollywood etc. and basic Indian middle class values….and the kids from Tibet are acting up…but I’m sure that the same problem in both Dharamsala and the states is that there aren’t really any sort of organizations I’ve heard of that help people make the transition between cultures.
It can be extremely weird moving to a new culture and extremely insulting when people try to tell you that your idea of “cool” is completely stupid and ridiculous. I studied in London for a few years and I found it took quite a while to get used to the different things that are expected of you on a basic every day level….for one thing you can’t talk loudly in public places or be in anyway excessively expressive or they get scared or pissed off…and after a weekend in Cambridge where I realised me and my friends were the only ones NOT dressed entirely in black….I had to dump all my bright kurtis and pick up some nice drab warm winter sweaters….its fine I guess…when you figure out how to make a compromise between what you bring with you and what you leave behind…
But there’s a line you have to draw regarding how much of your cultural habits you you are willing to trash just for the sake of blending into the local populace and appearing normal. After a while I just think I’d rather be an outrageous cultural canker sore and deal with other people’s idiotic glances and raised eyebrows than end up feeling like a dog with my tail between my legs. I’m moving back there soon so have been thinking about this…
What I don’t understand is if these kind of problems are clearly ongoing phenomenon…why aren’t there better social services designed to help people cope? Do you know of any? Because I actually know a woman who works as a therapist in Bombay and helps people who suffer class discrimination as a result of appearing “local” . But then again one has to contend with the great desi phobia of sending anyone to a shrink….after all only crazy people go to therapists right?
remainsofthedesi
life is too short to figure out what others expect you to wear to fit in and on and on…..
I dont live in canada and the only reason i care what they do over there is cause these folks can easily come south.
If any one HERE(US) was to suggest increasing social services for these kind of folks i’d vehemently oppose it.
Resources are finite and should be put into good use not into a pit created by people who lack values.