Aniruddh Vasudevan is visiting the US and has an interesting account of his experiences as “the quintessentially exotic Other: dancer, Indian, queer”

 What I am saying is that, I begin to feel that even when one travels for the first time somewhere, that romantic sense of “happy anonymity” that I used to believe in, is not really there. Perhaps it existed in those times when communities really lived in complete ignorance about one another and occasional travellers (like Hieun Tsang or Fa Hien or Marco Polo) operated as windows to cultural exchange. Now, in spite of the so-called information explosion online, on TV, etc., what we have is not so much as awareness as it is some funny, a priori knowledge about you that precedes you where you go. You don’t really get to go somewhere just as you, hoping that no one knows you, you don’t know anyone. People sort of already know you in a million different ways, most of which constitute a type, and they either verify you against that prototype or simply take you to be that.

 Read his post here.