The Bed That Ted Made

Journalists, reporters, please listen. My future fellow Indians (as I still fully intend to become an Indian citizen), please listen and share. I understand that my photo looks like some white American, easy to believe that I’m egotistical with a savior complex and perhaps even crazy. After all, they say that I “attacked a doctor”.

Of all of those things, the only one that is accurate is that I am still an American citizen. I have chosen to live in India since moving here in 2012, at which time I worked as a professor at VIT for a year and a half. At the end of 2013, I switched focus to Indian government school education, and I was sponsored by Tata Trusts for a 5-year ‘B’ Visa. Well before that Visa had expired, while Obama was still US president, I decided for absolute certain that I wanted to move to India permanently, and to live out my life here. My reasons for deciding this are to be found in my social media posts and interactions from the past 5 years.

At one point, I fell in love with an amazing Bengali woman, and we agreed to be married. I thought I would naturally become a citizen then. However, the relationship ended because, although I am a very compassionate and honest person, I can also be very unpleasant at time — a jerk, if you will. Believe me, after losing the first woman I ever truly wished to marry, I began to work very hard on my personality, understanding that it’s not enough to be a good person; in order to be effective in life, I must learn to be a loving and attentive person. I have made much progress, and still have much progress to make.

Since 2017, I have also been supporting a group of talented and determined young Blind people in Shillong, Meghalaya. Initially, I helped a few of them to take a residence in Lower Lachumiere, and to form and register a public non-profit organization, an NGO called Blind Lead Trust (http://blindlead.org). If you search the web for my name and the name of the trust, you will find that last year (June 2019), we had an unfortunate encounter with the building owner and her daughter, who was at that time a district magistrate in Garo Hills. They wanted the Blind residents to vacate their building, and came with a series of false allegations to try to force them out quickly. Around March/April 2019, they began shutting off the water to that apartment only for increasing periods of time. When I would visit, the water would be working. As soon as I would leave (I was working in Chhattisgarh and Gujarat), the water would stop working, for days at a time. The house became a filthy health hazard, which was the owners’ intention. One of the blind boys became very ill, and remained ill for months afterward. The police were called multiple times and failed to intervene or even register the blind people’s complaints. On the morning of June 20th, I went up to speak with the house owners, who claimed that the pipes were out of order. On seeing the water pump motor controls just next to their doorbell, I pressed the green button and went back downstairs to check the water, and found that indeed, the water was running again. The owner and her daughter followed me down 5 minutes later, and the rest of the story is in the newspapers. In that case, I was acting to protect young blind people, who were facing discrimination from both the house owners and the police. You might call that “activist”.

In the present case, I was in great physical pain, suffering an arterial blockage, most likely a heart attack, although even now, 8 days later, I have not been permitted to exit my house to see a doctor of my choosing. Officially, I am under quarantine, however, I have tested negative for Covid and none of the Civil Hospital staff who wrestled me and held me down for an hour are under quarantine. So effectively, I am under “house arrest”, being prevented under false pretences from leaving my flat in Nongthymmai, Shillong. The office of the Deputy Commissioner (DC) informed that it is a technicality and asked for my cooperation, and I have given it. The DC office also informed me that if I want medical attention for my heart condition or anything else, I must call emergency 108 and an ambulance will take me to Civil Hospital — the same hospital that refused to give me even one single Aspirin when I arrive there in an ambulance on June 6th with severe chest pains. In my opinion, this is a rather cruel joke.

The Shillong Times, run by Patricia Mukhim, was the first newspaper to cover the incident at Civil Hospital — the article villainized me and the Shillong Times (despite what they may claim now) made zero effort to contact me. My phone numbers and email addresses are easy enough to find on the internet, and my associate Jitendra Dkhar actually spoke with a Shillong Times reporter and gave them my phone number. But my phone records will show clearly that they never called me. In fact, No Reporter from any news outlet has reached out to me by any means. At the same time, Patricia Mukhim (Shillong Times chief), a woman whom I had until recently respected as leading figure in Shillong society, left a scathing comment on my first post about the incident — “You are better off in Trump’s America. We are better off without so called aid workers that constantly get on the wrong side of the law….Why do ‘whites’ believe they must be treated with kid gloves…” These are the public words of the well-reputed woman who runs the Shillong TImes, the publication that defamed and maligned me in its first report, and their report was then picked up by the other Indian media outlets, all without my ever having a chance to tell my side.

My side is summarized in these audio recordings:

I can tell you that I’m not a “white” descendent of colonists, but rather my father was Persian from Iran and my mother’s family left eastern Europe prior to the Jewish Holocaust, which is fortunate, because both of my parents are Jewish. I personally am agnostic, preferring to tolerate diverse beliefs and ideas, so long as they do not impinge on the well-being of others.

I can tell you that I am not an “aid worker” and I don’t work with “charities” — but I have explained this in a previous post. What is important to understand is that I am not your “typical” anything. I have long since chosen India over my country of birth, because even under Obama, I could see that India has far more potential to lead the world with compassion and mutual respect, rather than greed and xenophobia. Yes, I know that many Indians will think me crazy for seeing compassion and mutual respect in India — but consider that I was comparing with the US, and today, finally, I think everyone can see very clearly that, with all of our flaws here in India, we are far more compassionate and far less greedy and selfish (on average) than the majority of Americans. Racism in India is grounded in complex historical tensions, whereas racism in America is grounded in very simple, unscrupulous behaviors that persisted for the first century after the founding of the US…..and if you look closely, you will see that they persist still. India has a rich culture dating back thousands and thousands of years, a culture that is largely preserved, even if not always visible at the surface. The indigenous cultures of America also dated back thousands of years — but the initial colonists starting from Columbus all the way through to the modern era American leadership, they have willfully exterminated 95% of the indigenous American tribal nations. That’s 95% gone forever, and those who remain in the US today are treated with utmost disrespect, and many of them have a quality of life on par with India’s poor.

India, you are burying me successfully in the media. The character assassination is nearing completion, and I am not one to “attack” in return. Before I’m gone, whether from heart attack or stroke or deportation or inability to work or just plain humiliation — before I’m gone, I am asking those of you who share my values of compassion and social justice to look closely at me, to see clearly what you are losing. I am no prize for sure, my ex-fiance made that clear enough to me. But I am intelligent, innovative, and committed to India’s future; I am formally and informally trained in the practice of science, in biomedical engineering, in development of low-cost assistive technologies for persons with disabilities; I am supporting a group of amazing young blind people in Shillong, and they are brilliant and fully committed to reform societal biases against blind people and to create new opportunities for blind people to advance in society and gain independence; I am old and not very attractive, so I won’t be competing with you for mates…. ok, on that note, I think I’ve said all I have to say for now. Please listen to my recordings on SoundCloud. And please help me to get at least something of my honorable reputation back — I can honestly say that, if you do share my values, then I deserve your support, and if you collectively can help me through this confused mess that has been engineered to discredit me, I can guarantee you that I will continue to devote my life to improving real educational opportunities for the majority of Indians, those who have benefited least from modern amenities and who will now suffer most from Covid and its aftermath.

Please listen: https://soundcloud.com/tedmoallem/sets/the-bed-that-ted-made