The Heartbreaking Death of Srinivas Kuchibhotla
I’ve been thinking and praying for Srinivas Kuchibhotla since the news broke.
I’ve been thinking about how I work for an Indian company. How our upper management, workforce, and local office is mostly Indian-American or immigrants or located offshore. I’ve been thinking of how fondly I feel towards my offshore coworkers. How we wish each other “Happy Diwali!” and “Merry Christmas!” without hesitation. How we ask about our families and friendships and workloads. How I have become enmeshed in a mutual network of help with Deepak and Srini and Sunit and Phani.
I’ve also been thinking about how our company’s major provided service revolves on outsourcing technical support for US-based companies to American subcontractors. How that service is a product of racism. How Americans made calling tech support a cruel joke cemented firmly in racism and took it so far that US companies demanded their help desks be staffed with native English speakers. How I was hired because my voice reveals my place of birth and place of privilege. How callers sound relieved to hear the drawl I can’t quite get rid of when the calls get routed back to my desk from overseas. How much it stings to hear “Oh thank God, I couldn’t understand the last guy and figured I’d just keep calling until I reached one of you.”
As if they were not one of us. As if we didn’t have the same job. As if they were not on my team. As if I had never I had never asked them for help. As if I never asked them about their families. As if they had never asked me about my fiance. As if my coworkers weren’t worth considering at all.
The other day, a coworker from another floor was in a heated discussion over the executive order on immigration. I sat and listened as an Indian immigrant explained to an older white man with arms crossed defiantly the realities of the immigration ban, the atrocities of Syria, the proxy wars, the fatality rates for making a trip across the Mediterranean for those escaping the conflict. I sat and listened to someone who had experienced and understood the context of Hindu-Muslim relations, the realities of conflict created through a lens designed by British colonization, and despite it all, managed to show patience and kindness towards an older white man who wasn’t willing to listen, whose only solution was to “send em back to where they came from.”
In Kansas, on Wednesday night, Srinivas Kuchibhotla was shot by a man who yelled: “Get out of my country!”
America, 2017.
💔
