On a cleaner slate

Gone are the days when Indians aspired to small-time jobs as an ad in Australia has demonstrated.

There must have been a misunderstanding about the job advertisement that Coles Supermarket posted on Gumtree.com last Sunday. The ad, seeking cleaners for the Coles' outlet in Hobart, Tasmania reads, "Store requires no Indians or Asians, please. Must speak English," and has been greeted with mystifying outrage. Enraged Facebook users have called for the boycott of the Eastlands Shopping Centre. The Anti-Discrimination Office of Australia is launching an investigation into the matter. The subcontractor who actually posted the ad has already been fired. All this when, quite to the contrary, the ad should have been hailed worldwide as a new milestone in the Indian struggle against racism in Australia.

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Gone are the days when Indian immigrants to Aussie-land were associated with 7/11s, taxi-driving and toilet-cleaning. The ad clearly implies that Indians in Australia today can aspire to much greater things (provided they survive their college years in Melb-ourne or Sydney without being mugged, knifed, or set alight, that is.) Now that the tables have finally been turned, we Indians can take the next big step in improving our relations with Australians by inviting them to wrestle mugger crocodiles (no pun intended) in the Amravathi Reservoir (provided they speak Tamil, of course.)

There's another misunderstanding. The Anti-Discrimination official who has further criticised this groundbreaking advert for including knowledge of English as a job requirement obviously has not done an honest day of floor-mopping in her life. We want to know which English the advert was speaking of. Is it Aussie English, in which case we may not be up to the mark, mate. But, we want to know whether Aussiees aspiring to jobs in India can speak our marbles-in-the-mouth Mallu English or our rosogolla-accented Bong English. If they can't, well, we may have to turn down their applications. And what's the average Australian's take on this? Several e-readers left comments on newspaper websites claiming they saw "nothing special about the ad." We do. And it is that you won't find us to clean up after you in a hurry.