I have a fairly simple two syllable, 6 letter name first name, yet it is misspelled regularly and sometimes the misspellings utterly unbelievable. For example a recent one introduced multiple new syllables! (It wasn’t by an Indian, in case you’re wondering.) I don’t really mind it and I find the more esoteric spellings amusing. But coming back to the point, in terms of absolute quantity, yes more Indians have misspelled my name that others. But that’s entirely because the overwhelming majority of my e-mail is from Indians. My unscientific impression is that people who aren’t Indian misspell my name slightly more often than Indians, which isn’t at all surprising because my name is an Indian name and so is unlikely to be familiar to these people.

I don’t know why we do this but anytime some Indian does something that is vaguely worthy of being criticized, not only do we all jump in and criticize that person, we assign blame to our entire nationality, as if that failing is a genetic trait passed on to all Indians! The more people I meet the more I am convinced that us human beings are all mostly identical and there isn’t really anything that Indians do better or worse than other people.

Anyway, the summary is that I think it would have been sufficient to say, “I get a lot of e-mail that misspells my name. This is very annoying.” There is no need to blame an entire country, especially when that blame is being placed without any evidence supporting it. These types of statements are harmful because they reinforce the prejudices of racists who already consider us inferior human beings. And I certainly don’t see any benefit at all to blaming all Indians in comparison to the more neutral statement that I suggested above.

—
@Ankur – thanks and fixed.

It’s possible no harm was meant by this statement, but I wish you wouldn’t make condescending generalizations of this kind which are based on nothing more than anecdata.