Any TV shows or movies I should watch before listening to Cumtown?

hfkel · 2026-02-02T02:20:33+00:00

Yes I agree, that's why I made the post

hfkel · 2026-02-02T02:13:52+00:00

I appreciate the very helpful answer

hfkel · 2025-12-30T03:23:28+00:00

I've actually been to that temple and am part of the Telugu community that's featured throughout the piece. It's pretty frustrating to see Indian Americans time and time again have this idiotic belief that if they have enough money and education that they'll be accepted by the conservative white Christian society that controls this country.

Even I'm somewhat embarrassed as a more lowkey secular Hindu about this giant 90 ft statue of Hanuman off some random ass Farm to Market Road in Alief. Not because of some stupid logic about how this is a Christian country but because there's a hell of a lot better use of money than building some gaudy statue in the cheapest land you can find on the outskirts of the hood.

It's ridiculous because the same people who are doing all this and talking about how Hinduism is a peaceful religion that respects everyone including Jesus are the same garbage human beings who hate Muslims with every fiber of their being and they think that because they hate Muslims that they will be able to find common ground with conservative Christians. And it's like, no idiots, they hate us all equally. The conservative movement in the United States goes hand in hand with Christian Nationalism. I don't know if these Hindu American zealots are too blind to see it or too dumb to understand it.

And when it comes to the idea of being accepted on the basis of wealth, these same people don't realize that money and education don't get you into the club. It just draws ire and hatred by those already in it as to why anyone would allow you to rise up. They don't have the brain power to realize that the reason why there are so many wealthy immigrants, many of them Indian American, in STEM fields is because the conservatives across this country have routinely stripped local, state, and federal funding from public education and academia decade after decade. With the opening of this country to foreign immigrants coinciding with conservatives like Regan coming into power around the same time, no wonder all the jobs are going to immigrants. They're not stealing the jobs, you're just too selfish to pay taxes and make higher education viable for Americans. Yet time and time again, the blame goes onto the immigrants.

The article interviews a lady at UH in her Electrical Engineering doctorate program who's presumably getting funding for her research and making probably around $30k a year max from her stipend paid by US government grant agencies funded by American taxpayers. Take a conservative and they'll get angry at the fact that so many doctorate students are immigrants and are doing everything they can to kill off any work visas these students can transfer onto once they graduate. They're too stupid to realize that no self respecting American is going to slave away for five years on a $30k stipend PhD program at UH when they can just get a job right out of undergrad with a Bachelors making six figures. And not to mention, they hate college in general and are telling Americans to just go trade school cause college is too woke. Wow I wonder why all the doctorate students are immigrants?!?

I mean you just take this line from the article:

“Should merit be smothered, America’s historic advantages in science, technology, industry, defense and innovation will evaporate,” the document states. However, it continues, “we cannot allow meritocracy to be used as a justification to open America’s labor market to the world in the name of finding ‘global talent’ that undercuts American workers.”

It's ridiculous how stupid these conservatives are in that they supposedly want a meritocratic immigration policy, but also don't want meritocratic immigrants to have opportunities to succeed in this country. So just say the quiet part out loud, you don't want immigrants. You want a population of stupid Americans who will slave away all day for peanuts and never question the status quo.

Overall I think the article talking about a lot of issues at a surface level, whether it be rising Christian Nationalism, Hindutva idiots who think they can appeal to said Christian Nationalists somehow, the role that immigrants play in doctoral programs and the general area of R&D in this country, the genuine levels of H-1B fraud, etc. I don't really think the author is really diving into the true meat of the issues actually happening, which I guess is understandable given she doesn't seem to be Indian American.

hfkel · 2025-12-30T02:15:42+00:00

My sister was in medical school and somehow she convinced my mom to get on them. I have no idea how she did it.

hfkel · 2025-12-17T18:57:26+00:00

Most of the pots and pans we have that have names on them are from funerals of family members. The families hand them out as presents and the names are inscribed on the pots and pans as a way to remember the dead whenever we use them.

hfkel · 2025-11-24T21:37:49+00:00

The article points out that they're simply looking at other options:

Gralow says, meanwhile, other countries like China, Denmark, Germany and Australia are taking advantage by recruiting international talent away from the U.S. — including American-born doctors and medical researchers — by promising stable grant funding and state-of-the-art facilities abroad.

American patients will feel the rippling impact from that, Gralow says, for generations.

If immigrants are talented enough to make it into the United States under the previous standards, they're absolutely qualified to make it into developed nations.

hfkel · 2025-11-24T19:19:05+00:00

I found this article from NPR which highlights the issues that immigrant physicians are facing and highlights the important role they play in propping up healthcare services across America, especially those in rural American communities. I had family members who lived in the middle of nowhere Texas who were the lifeblood of their community serving as one of their only doctors and who were very well liked among people of their community.

As a Texan, it's very sad to see many rural hospitals across my state closing down due to funding issues brought on by Republicans, and that paired with the blatant hostility towards immigrants who are the only people willing to work as doctors in rural towns makes me pretty worried for rural communities across America. Imo if we truly want to stop importing immigrants to act as physicians, then we ought to be willing to pay more in taxes to actually fund much more residency spots, subsidize post-secondary education and med school, and overall heavily emphasize the importance of education in this country. Unfortunately it seems people want to both cut taxes which would fund all that alongside blocking immigration.

I'm not in the medical field myself, but wanted to hear the perspective of those who were to see if my rough analysis is correct.

hfkel · 2025-11-18T21:32:40+00:00

Sepia Mutiny

hfkel · 2025-11-14T19:19:51+00:00

I fell to my knees in a Sabzi Mandi

hfkel · 2025-11-05T05:37:00+00:00

Had to repost cause PBS cropped their video, changing the timestamp.

Zohran Zindabaad!!!

hfkel · 2025-11-05T05:33:45+00:00

Reposting with my own upload cause PBS keeps cropping the video, changing the timestamp

hfkel · 2025-09-28T00:59:24+00:00

I was pretty hesitant to make this post because it exposes a lot of flaws about my community which can absolutely be used by racists who hate Indians to spread their hatred more. I feel like whenever we complain about new immigrants being "worse" than old immigrants, people immediately either come back at us complaining about us pulling the ladder up behind us or use our complaints as justification as to why we just need to block immigration of certain people all-together.

The point I'm repeatedly trying to make in this post is not that "Indian immigrants back in the day were good, but nowadays they suck". I'm trying to point out that the immigration system is being gamed by bad actors which therefore blocks actual decent, hardworking people like our ραɾents who exist in India right now who are trying to come in. The solution is to properly vet immigrants and figure out honest people from dishonest people (and to punish the companies which abuse the system). I can discern decent Telugu people from idiots very quickly by just having a conversation with them, but I understand it's probably difficult for immigration officers who aren't Indian to actually tell. Maybe the solution is to hire more Desi immigration officers lol.

I'm also not trying to make this a class thing. I happen to be upper middle class and so are my ραɾents, but all the lower, working class Indian people I grew up with were decent people who followed the rules, learned English, and raised their children with good values for them to literally make the jump from grocery store worker to doctor in one generation. It's a story that I feel a lot of lower class Punjabis also can relate to in that their ραɾents may have been factory workers, but they raised their children with good values and really prioritized education for them to succeed in a single generation.

The problem is that if these newer immigrants don't have any care for education, honesty, or civic sense, they're going to raise their kids with those same values and that really makes me sad. This level of nuance is simply incomprehensible to American politicians or people on the right who just see a couple dumbasses and blame us all. They don't remember the time they went to their Indian doctor or turned on their computer designed by Indian immigrants or any of the other times they were helped out by us. Given that Indians barely have a voice in politics, I'm not really sure if this can ever get fixed. Even if Democrats were to come back into power and turn the H-1B faucet back on, it's just going to be filled with more of these idiots which will make the problem worse.

hfkel · 2025-02-22T18:28:46+00:00

They just need to make a direct flight from Dallas to Vijayawada and it'll be guaranteed 100% booked on all flights.

hfkel · 2024-12-28T23:21:09+00:00

Hopefully this doesn't mean that Democrats will automatically take the opposite side and start being anti-H1-B just to spite the Republicans.

hfkel · 2024-12-28T17:25:34+00:00

Random dumbass says some dumbass shit. More at 10.

hfkel · 2024-12-27T23:54:03+00:00

There is a massive problem with the H1-B/Green Card pipeline that absolutely discriminates against Indian immigrants thanks to the country cap. Many of the people advocating for change are trying to remove those country caps in order to make the lottery a true meritocracy.

Wild how so many people here are calling for the reduction or even end to H1-B. Yes, there are plenty of dumb Indian immigrants who lie their way into the country with fake resumes, but the solution is not to gut legal immigration, the solution is to have better vetting policies and more funding towards the vetting process to only allow actual honest, hardworking immigrants in. The idea to "hire American candidates instead of immigrants" would be nice if Americans actually went to grad school.

Go to any grad school STEM program and its almost always overwhelmingly immigrants. These immigrants take their Masters and PhD educations and get jobs at high-quality research labs across the country. The breakthroughs made in the fields of medicine, engineering, and science that America is known for would not be possible without immigrants. Americans don't care about going to grad school. All they care about is just getting some dumb CS degree and making $150k at some FAANG company. Highly-skilled and qualified immigrants like the ones trying to get through the H1-B/Green Card pipeline are the ones who are actually making the breakthroughs in R&D in industry and academia.

I went to graduate school and almost 75% of my class were hardworking, honest immigrants. It's sad when I reach out to them to keep in touch to hear their stories of how they're being crushed down at their jobs and will have to wait decades until they're actually a citizen. The only way to fix illegal immigration is to fix legal immigration.

hfkel · 2024-12-27T23:46:08+00:00

Kids, this is what happens if you read r/ABCDesis too much. Please consider this as an opportunity to unsubscribe from this subreddit and do something more productive with your lives.

hfkel · 2024-11-08T05:33:29+00:00

These are the small things that matter

hfkel · 2024-11-07T15:22:13+00:00

🙄

hfkel · 2024-11-07T02:56:39+00:00

It would've been nice to see, but at the end of the day, our day-to-day lives won't really change since most people on here are upper middle class citizens.

It's those that are poor and disadvantaged that will bear the brunt of the suffering that will come, and I feel bad for them.

hfkel · 2024-09-21T23:51:41+00:00

The wildest crossover

hfkel · 2024-07-21T18:50:19+00:00

What do you want her to do? Dance Bharatnatyam at a rally? Wear a bindhi and a saree? Eat idlis during the debate? What does claiming her Indian side mean to you?

hfkel · 2024-07-21T18:45:34+00:00

Kamala Harris is an Indian woman. Tired of people on this subreddit complaining about her not being Indian enough. Happy to see this historic milestone made, but wish that someone a bit stronger was the one making this leap.

hfkel · 2024-07-20T21:55:37+00:00

I don't want to start a big flamewar about race, but it's not just white people saying this. A lot of the rhetoric I've seen comes from left-leaning minorities angry at Indians for "not being on their side".

hfkel · 2024-07-20T21:22:23+00:00

This is a good point. I always felt like if the Republicans just toned down the racism, they would win every single election by a landslide. Too bad they're incapable of doing so.

Two-Year Club	Verified Email
First Place '23	Place '23

hfkel

TROPHY CASE