I pirouette between anger, frustration and an eerie calm every time this happens.

"This" being that coldness and rudeness that borders on racism.

I'm brown.

I teach. I learn. I live.

I earn. I pay for my coffee.

I also wear horse blinders and brush off these borderline cases of racist behaviour from the white man, because every good Indian - heck, every good foreigner, knows that she does not need the extra baggage.

And every sensible foreigner knows that not all white people are like that.

In a recent discussion, a friend and I concluded that borderline racial slurs and sexual advances are probably the hardest things to fight off in this day and age, because they are so hard to prove. How, for instance, could one prove a "bad vibe" from the guy I bought my coffee from this morning, without being accused of paranoia or over-sensitivity? How can one prove that the "accidental" brush of that stranger on the bus was anything but?

Even as I write this, I can hear my mother say, poni le - anni alaga seriousga teesukuntay pani jaragadu. And so I let it go. Because, as mom says, if one starts to seriously dwell on these things, we're not going to get any work done.

And every brown-skinned girl in a white bread world wants to get their work done and get out of it, right?