‘After 17 years of living here, I am made to feel like an outsider’

There is anger in India, justifiably, at the series of apparently racist attacks on Indian students in Australia.
But look around you — our fellow citizens and foreign visitors are subjected to similar prejudices, and worse, in our everyday lives, even right here in the national capital.
In two years, this city is set to hold the Commonwealth Games, the world's second largest sporting event — the most globalised version of sport ever in this country.
But at its core, there is nothing cosmopolitan, nothing global about New Delhi.
This city of 15 million remains a city of primitive prejudices and attitudes where young women cannot walk alone on the roads or travel on the Metro after dark and people from the Northeast and Kashmir cannot rent homes.
More than half a million pour into the capital every year, seeking a new life and a new destiny. But thousands face the stigma of being an “outsider” every day, and have their very Indianness routinely questioned in India’s capital. whether it is at the shopping mall or at the workplace, renting out apartments or at the college canteen.
In a series of stories beginning today, we lay bare this side of the city — and also seek to break the myths and stereotypes that hold back people from renting out an apartment to a woman from Imphal or Baramulla.