Because I know the Internet is a safe place where I can admit to stereotyping an entire race of people and NOBODY will freak out about it, I share this with you: I thought all Indians were smart. Not just some. Not just a handful, or a select few. All 1.2 billion of ‘em. Rich or poor, didn’t matter—I had them all pegged as neurosurgeons, computer code writing savants, smarty-pants science people…basically, anything that I was intellectually incapable of tackling (and it’s a long list with new entries added multiple times, every day) I always thought, “If I were Indian, I’d be makin’ little bitches out of these chemical equations right about now.”
This may as well be in hieroglyphics.
And I was cruising along just fine with my shallow, incorrect belief system until Indian merchant Rajesh Shah had to go and poop in the tandoor. Shah and his business partner recently opened a menswear store. And they named that store: Hitler. As in Adolf Hit–…well you know. And you do know, right? And, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to insult your intelligence, but I’m only asking if you know who I’m talking about and why this is a dubious choice to name anything because Mr. Shah and his boy totally claim that they didn’t know that Hitler was such a bad guy.
To be fair, this was their point of reference. Battle of the Bulge indeed!
And their explanation of how they arrived at naming their store is this lame mash-up of bullshit: it’s named after the business partner’s grandfather who portrayed Adolph Hitler in a college play, but was also, apparently, quite a taskmaster and so everyone called him Hitler and it stuck. Wha..? Shah even says he didn’t know that the real Hitler had ordered the murder of 6 million Jews until after the store opened.
Maybe—and I stress maybe—I’d buy the dude’s plea of ignorance and come to grips with the fact that there are, in fact, dumb people in India if I didn’t know an entire INTERNET existed where Hitler’s atrocities might reveal themselves if you, I don’t know, ever typed the name Hitler anywhere on a computer screen…which you know these guys did hundreds of time prior to their store opening. And maybe I’d be swayed into thinking that this is just an isolated case of dumbass, but that there other businesses in India named after Hitler! And these are 100% I-Shit -You-Not real entities: there’s a pool hall named Hitler’s Den, somebody started an Internet advertising company as Adolf Hitler Inc., and Hitler Didi (translated as Hitler Sister) is popular on Indian television. India, What the hell?!
source, source, source, source
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