HITLER'S CAFÉ IN INDIA
MUMBAI, India—The international press reports that twenty-three year-old Puneet Sabhlok, a novice restaurateur, wanted a catchy café name to sell his $3 to $4 plates of crostii tonno, pear and ricotta salad and pannacotta. So he went with Hitler's Cross. He put a swastika in the logo. "Hitler is a catchy name. Everyone knows Hitler," he explained in an interview.
The café opened this week in a remote suburb of Mumbai. At first, business was brisk. But as word spread, revulsion followed. Before long, India's Jews, joined by diplomats from Israel and Germany and the Anti-Defamation League in New York, were working to shut the place down.
Abraham Foxman, the U.S. Anti-Defamation League's national director, issued a statement saying the restaurant "denigrates the memory of the victims and does a dangerous disservice to the Mumbai community by downplaying the horrors of the Holocaust."
Thursday, after meeting with a Jewish community leader here, Sabhlok agreed to rechristen the restaurant. The pannacotta will stay, the swastika will go. "I never wanted to promote Hitler," Sabhlok said. "I just wanted to promote my restaurant."
Indeed, the episode was treated in the local media as a cheap publicity stunt. But it seems also to reflect a curious and growing fascination with Hitler in a country whose pluralist traditions would appear to make it unlikely soil for Nazi ideas.
"This is part of a bigger problem," Daniel Zonshine, the Israeli consul general in Mumbai, said in a telephone interview.
"In India, it's a bit more than in other countries," he added. "India was far away from the Second World War. I don't think that many refugees from Europe came to India during the war. So the knowledge that people suffered is less here than in other countries. I definitely see it as part of my job to try to do something about that."
Mein Kampf is a hot seller at many Indian streetside book stalls. When a German writer, Georg Martin Oswald, came to India recently on an exchange program, he wrote in an online diary of being stunned at the book's popularity.
Newspaper surveys have found that significant numbers of Indian college students rate Hitler as an ideal model for an Indian leader. A 2002 survey by the Times of India, an English-language daily, noted that Hitler signified discipline, efficiency and nationalism to the students. Hitler also holds appeal for some Hindu nationalists who dream of a more assertive, conquering India cleansed of its Muslim population.
Read it all.
The café opened this week in a remote suburb of Mumbai. At first, business was brisk. But as word spread, revulsion followed. Before long, India's Jews, joined by diplomats from Israel and Germany and the Anti-Defamation League in New York, were working to shut the place down.
Abraham Foxman, the U.S. Anti-Defamation League's national director, issued a statement saying the restaurant "denigrates the memory of the victims and does a dangerous disservice to the Mumbai community by downplaying the horrors of the Holocaust."
Thursday, after meeting with a Jewish community leader here, Sabhlok agreed to rechristen the restaurant. The pannacotta will stay, the swastika will go. "I never wanted to promote Hitler," Sabhlok said. "I just wanted to promote my restaurant."
Indeed, the episode was treated in the local media as a cheap publicity stunt. But it seems also to reflect a curious and growing fascination with Hitler in a country whose pluralist traditions would appear to make it unlikely soil for Nazi ideas.
"This is part of a bigger problem," Daniel Zonshine, the Israeli consul general in Mumbai, said in a telephone interview.
"In India, it's a bit more than in other countries," he added. "India was far away from the Second World War. I don't think that many refugees from Europe came to India during the war. So the knowledge that people suffered is less here than in other countries. I definitely see it as part of my job to try to do something about that."
Mein Kampf is a hot seller at many Indian streetside book stalls. When a German writer, Georg Martin Oswald, came to India recently on an exchange program, he wrote in an online diary of being stunned at the book's popularity.
Newspaper surveys have found that significant numbers of Indian college students rate Hitler as an ideal model for an Indian leader. A 2002 survey by the Times of India, an English-language daily, noted that Hitler signified discipline, efficiency and nationalism to the students. Hitler also holds appeal for some Hindu nationalists who dream of a more assertive, conquering India cleansed of its Muslim population.
Read it all.
posted by Gabriel Thy at 10:16 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home