Any discrimination is demeaning, if not deadly, and I got a taste of it when I was stopped rudely at the entrance of a glitzy mall during my time in West Asia. My colour and demeanour weren’t welcoming. My Western colleague, who was accompanying me, had no such problem. Though the country I lived in then offered riches, I had to endure the humiliation that was an upshot of the widely practised policy of single Asian males not being allowed in public places, particularly on holidays. It was not written anywhere, but the differential treatment often surfaced. Apart from my Indianness, my birth religion put me at a disadvantage in a region that still does not allow a Hindu temple. And when an editorial dispute arose at the workplace over a certain news article on Kashmir, I lost the debate even before it began. My views were dismissed because I am an Indian—and a Hindu.