"The worst NRI nightmare is Idi Amin's Uganda," recalled Shanti Lakhani in Leicester, UK.
"A glimpse of the same horror was repeated last week." No matter where they live, all non-resident Indians (NRIs) recoil with panic at the brutal treatment by the Ugandan despot Amin.
The recent violent demonstrations near Jinja and in the capital Kampala were a reminder of the dark days of the Amin era from 1971-1979 during which the dictator ordered all Indians to leave Uganda in 1972.
This mass expulsion from their homes and businesses without taking any assets remains the ultimate disaster for all NRIs.
Lakhani should know. He and his family came with just 50 pounds to Britain 35 years ago as 'Ugandan Refugees'.
Before he flew out, he buried his gold ornaments in a secret spot in his home. Moving to Leicester where other Ugandan Indians were converging, he started from a scratch as a petrol station attendant.
Working almost round the clock, he bought the business a few years later with a bank loan guaranteed by his friends.
It took some more years to repay this loan. By then, the new Uganda President Yoweri Museveni invited the Ugandan Indians back to Uganda 'to re-construct' their former homeland.
Lakhani went back but only to dig up his ornaments from his home now taken over by Africans. Other Indian traders, including the two major Indian business groups, the Madhvanis and the Mehtas, returned to restart their operations and prospered again.
And now 35 years after this exodus that grabbed world headlines, the anger against Indians in Uganda resurfaced in all its ugliness when Indians were attacked, forced to close their shops and a young Indian was lynched to death.
It all started with a protest by environmentalists who wanted to save part of a forest that the government wanted to hand over to the Mehta Group for developing a sugarcane plantation.
'Save the forest' protest by the opposition morphed into an anti-Indian diatribe. The protesters carried banners screaming 'Asians should go' and 'For every tree cut, five Indians dead'. From Jinja, it spread to Kampala.
The Indians hurriedly downed their shop shutters to save them from being ransacked by the furious mob. The Indian banks also closed down.
Some Indians sought refuge in a temple that was attacked. And an Indian, Devang Rawal, was stoned and beaten to death by a vicious mob during a protest.
A day after his death, oblivious of what had happened in Kampala, Devang's mother in Ahmedabad was joyfully informing friends of her son's return in May and his wedding preparations.
When his body arrived in Ahmedabad, his mother and family were inconsolable.