Bombay

From Hong Kong I took a flight aboard Kingfisher Airlines to a heretofore brand new country, India and it's economic capital, Mumbai, to see Komal. There's quite a bit of confusion over the name of the city, which is officially Mumbai now but used to be Bombay. The switch in its English name happened in 1995. While the different names have their own political implications which I know little about, Komal and her friends call it Bombay, and so I call it that too. Depending on your definition of a city, Bombay is as high as the 2nd most populous city in the world. Without going into semantics, Bombay seemed to me to be at the same level of immense urban sprawl and density as Beijing and Shanghai and a level above New York and Hong Kong. The city is very much a coastal city, shaped like a sharp peninsula extending into the Arabian Sea. Downtown Bombay is located towards the point of the peninsula and the suburbs are located more inland.

I had a little adventure getting my Indian Visa. I went to the Consulate in Beijing about a week and a half before I was to leave. After initially going to the Embassy by mistake, then waiting for half an hour in a small room and then dealing with Chinese paperwork with the Consulate workers (all Chinese), I was finally told that they'd process everything in 10 days. I did some quick math and realized that the 10 day mark would be the Friday before my Sunday flight. If they were even a day late, I would not have my Visa, or more importantly, the US Passport that would go with it. After the panic subsided, I found out the phone number for the Indian consulate in Hong Kong, where I would be spending 3 days, and called them to see how quickly they could process a visa. They said that if I had a HK ID, they could process it in a day or two. Luckily I did have the ID, whew! I was able to bolt from the Beijing consulate.

The Hong Kong consulate visit was very painless. The person before me was an Indian man who spoke fluent Cantonese, which is always cool. So before I knew it I was on a six hour plane ride to India. Though it might not be intuitive, Hong Kong to Mumbai is further away than New York to LA. This plane ride was my first indication that I was journeying to a strange new land. The full airliner had maybe 3 Chinese people, maybe 3 white people. The rest of the airplane was all Indian. We all had television monitors in front of us with a nice selection of Bollywood and Hollywood. The woman next to me seemed to be watching an awesome Bollywood film, but every single time I picked a Bollywood film, it sucked. I ended up watching Chariots of Fire, which also did not live up to the hype generated by its theme song. Walking to the bathroom, I noticed that nearly every single monitor was tuned into Bollywood - just one was bucking the trend, showing Friends.

I asked the woman next to me how she enjoyed Hong Kong. She told me that it was nice, but very dry. "I beg you pardon?" I couldn't believe her. Hong Kong was the most humid place I

have ever been - it makes DC seem drier than a medieval history lecture. Then I stepped out of the plane, got hit by a tidal wave of humidity, and I figured out what she meant. It's hard to put into words the intensity of Bombay's marshlike air. Come to think of it, I've never been in a marsh, but I imagine one feels a little like Bombay. It wasn't quite a sauna but you could definitely feel the air.

Then I got my bags and went through immigration and without a cell phone, walked out of the airport hoping there'd be someone waiting for me. Luckily Komal was, with a driver, and we left for her father's apartment in Malabar Hill. Now although I did not see an elephant during the weekend, I do realize that there is an elephant in the room. With full regard to that, I need to say that my relationship with Komal officially ended during that car ride from the airport, and yes it did suck. I had had the whole summer to deal with this so it wasn't as difficult, but it certainly led to one of the most unusual weekends I think I will ever experience. For the first time in a long time, I was legitimately scared. I was in a very large city in a very foreign land around which I did not know how to navigate. But the worst part was that the uncertainty in my physical environment was matched by the uncertainty in my personal life and I would not wish that combination upon anybody.

However I was in a cool foreign city with a good friend and it was a pretty special opportunity. Komal's apartment was incredible, honestly the most amazing apartment I had ever been in, and staffed with several residing workers who didn't speak any English. A full two stories of marble floor overlooking the beach, the apartment was fit for a real estate mogul. Early the next morning though, Komal had work and I was left alone in the most foreign of homes. Though I was very comfortable in this mini palace, armed with the Hindi words for food and water if I needed sustenance, I constantly felt uncomfortable. I felt that as I was in such a different place I should go out and explore, but my lack of phone, language skills and familiarity with the surroundings made this a bigger difficulty than ever before. It was one thing to lodge in a hostel and be given free reign but I was staying in an apartment with police officers continually camped outside and I couldn't exactly leave and come back whenever I wanted. So I took a quick walk along the beach, which was pleasant but extremely dirty, and waited until Komal's driver came. By now used to communicating without full verbal fluency, I got the point across that I wanted to see the

Gateway of India and the Taj Mahal, and so he dropped me o

ff there and presumably went to find parking nearby. Again for all I knew I could have been stranded there with only a faint idea of how to get back, but I proceeded to walk around and admire some of the finest sites that Bombay had to offer. The Gateway is a large stone arch structure built to welcome Queen Mary and King George's visit to the city. It does impressively stand out on the water and I'm sure the sight is rather spectacular coming at the end of a long sea storage. I managed to find some Taiwanese businessmen and asked them to take a picture of me in front of the arch.

I found the neighboring Taj Mahal Palace & Tower (hotel named after the more famous

mausoleum in Agra) even more impressive. The Taj was probably the most iconic building to get hit by the 2008 terrorist attacks, and the image of the structure burning is still engrained in my mind. I think the building is beautiful with Indian-style minarets and classical-looking stone structure. I'm no expert on Indian architecture but I just thought that that building fit in so well there as a symbol of Indian grandeur. The Palace didn't actually completely reopen until about two weeks after I visited.

I got beset by a beggar while staring at the Taj who asked me to buy milk for her starving baby. I had never quite seen this particular approach but she was so stubborn that I considered just doing it for her. Then she said come walk with me and started walking towards lesser crowded places. I have no idea what her true intentions were but red alerts blared in my head and I stood firm, tossed her 60 rupees and ran for my driver.

That night out one of Komal's friend's drivers was on duty so he was able to shuttle us around to different spots. I'm not sure how many peoples' nights outs revolve around personal drivers but it was very much the norm here. We first went to a country club where I sampled the

legendary Indian Chinese food. I had heard glowing reviews from Indian people about the Chinese cuisine brewed within their borders, but having just come from the Chinese capital and not seeing a single Chinese person I was skeptical. Nonetheless I was very much surprised - the dumplings there were particularly good. I also sampled an Indian Coca-Cola knockoff (later bought by the Coca-Cola company) called Thums Up. I noticed there was no B, which apparently was news to Komal and one of her friends. We then went to a slick new club which apparently had a cover charge of like 3000 Rupees which is an absurd $66. Maybe I have that number wrong but it was definitely the steepest cover I had ever seen outside of New Year's Eve. However, one of Komal's friends who knew the club owner was having her birthday there and thus we entered for free so yeah pretty sweet deal. Believe it or not, people dance in the clubs there like they do in Bollywood movies.

That may or may not be true but you should at least pass my little tidbit along to other people.

Okay so that was fun. Anyways just about nobody wears short sleeves in Bombay, ever, and certainly not at a nightclub. So despite the earth-shattering humidity, I manned up and wore a nice button-down long sleeve and the one pair of jeans that I had brought to China, though I'm the kind of guy who prefers comfort over style and always wore shorts into Vic's. I write this now with an awareness that this is much ado about nothing, but I think that in the American culture in which I was raised, we are taught to be afraid of the elements. We blast AC during the summer and heating during the winter, and complain loudly whenever we have to do without them. But of course large portions of the globe live their entire lives in weather either hotter or colder than we ever experience and consider it simply the norm. At the least, I didn't hear a whole lot of weather complaints from locals in Beijing or Bombay.

Over the rest of the weekend, I experienced a minor monsoon (felt like a Noreaster), saw a Bollywood film to get in the spirit, went shopping for some fine Indian cotton, entered Victoria Terminus aka Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, aka the train station at the end of Slumdog Millionaire where Jamal meets Latika. The train station was actually a tremendous experience besides for the cinematic experience (I wasn't even sure that it was the station from the film while I visited). First, its exterior, designed in Victorian Gothic style but with decidedly South Asian elements, was an amazing display of architecture. But the interior held more stories than the glorified facade. I had used the train stations in Beijing this summer and nothing stateside had prepared me for those crowds, but that paled in comparison to the bustle ongoing at VT on that rainy day. The outside was a zoo of stubby black cabs, and the inside was a jumble of sales transactions, hurrying passengers, departing trains, trilingual announcements and security, for this was the most deadly location for the 2008 attacks. Seeing the crush of humanity in person, it is actually painful to imagine the effects of a gunmen entering and opening fire. Mumbai apparently doesn't or didn't have a fully operational metro system, and intracity transit (as well as intercity) was mostly done with the suburban rail system. That was how Anish moved around from his spot up north in Santacruz near the airport into the downtown. I could wax on and on about my thoughts inside the station, and indeed I would need to spend more time in Bombay to fully understand them. But perhaps the most significant to me was that all the cars were gender segregated. Indian society is run with a moral mandate, and in addition to a strict no kissing in public, men and women are only allowed in separate cars. The station was also very filthy - the monsoons seemed to only spread the city's dirt around rather than the cleanse it.

What I heard from Anish's experience was also pretty incredible. A second generation English citizen of Gujarati descent, Anish was in suburban Mumbai for the year doing Teach for India, which is exactly like Teach for America except that while America has drastic educational deficiencies for a first world country, India has drastic educational deficiencies period. While many American high schools have awful dropout rates, more than 1 in 3 children in India drop out before the FIFTH GRADE. So yeah I think it's safe to say it's a completely different game. Plus though I think Anish teaches in English and doesn't speak much Hindi, all the kids are still learning the language. Oh and the pay is even worse. Suffice to say it was very interesting meeting up with him, particularly since I found his experience as a British-Indian, who spoke Gujarati and now learning Hindi, living and working in his ancestral homeland's largest city very analogous to my experience in China.

Indeed, as my experiences with large world cities in developing countries is very limited, I could not help but to conceptualize Bombay through my understanding of Beijing. Both gigantic Asian world cities of 18 million plus have migrants from all over the country and investment from all over the world. Each city has their impressive skyscrapers, each city has their difficult slum conditions and both definitely face overcrowding and urban sprawl dilemmas. Both countries have booming economies and over a billion people, and face similar social, energy and political issues accordingly. Also in both cities I had great meals. However, differences in foreign domination, internal political movements, religious movements and even climate have molded the two cities and countries into perhaps fundamentally different places. Even in three days, I experienced some of these differences. I would like to preface that I'm not sure how well Bombay can act as a microcosm for greater India, or even Beijing for China, but I do believe that both cities in some way contain a large portion of their nation's cultural heart.

Anyone who knows me well knows how much I like diversity. On this measure, I loved Bombay. Coming from Beijing, where my even slightly ambiguous racial features had occasionally drawn attention, I fully expected to stand out like a sore thumb among the considerably darker Bombay populace. Not even slightly true. There was not a single instance where I thought anybody gave me an unusual glance, questioning why I was in their land. You may think to yourself, "I'd hope not! I'd hope people don't act like that in a large cosmopolitan city." But still, people in Beijing who have surely seen members of every nation still occasionally gawk at the tall Westerner or ask the African-American to pose for a photograph. I bet every single white or black American who has ever spent a week in China has a story like this. However, I don't know whether they have those stories in India. What led to Bombay's more casual acceptance of foreigners in its midst? The answer is likely twofold. First, while China closed its doors to outsiders for so long, India has historically had more foreign contact including nearly continuous foreign influence from the Persians to the British. Second, the country itself is extremely diverse. Sure China has over 50 minority groups, but the country is still about 92% Han Chinese, and the great Eastern cities like Beijing and Shanghai even more Han. Meanwhile, India does not even classify its population among racial lines. South Asians seem to have a different conception of race. In the United States, would pan-ethnically self-identify as "brown" in a way that Koreans, Japanese and Chinese would never self-identify as "yellow." Even further, many Indians are decidedly "not brown." Many people were clear to point out to me that I could conceivably have been from the northeast of the country where the inhabitants have more East Asian features. Did you know that Burma was once a part of British India and could have been part of the modern state? This great diversity is very much manifested in modern day Bombay.

As a result, demographics in India are more commonly drawn by language, where there is clearly no majority. While Hindi is perhaps a lingua franca in Northern India and is spread greatly by its use in Bollywood films, the South largely speak completely unrelated Dravidian languages. Other related Indo-Aryan languages like Marathi and Gujarati are spoken by large chunks of people. I don't know too much about this language family, but I think perhaps that these languages are perhaps about as related as Mandarin, Shanghainese, Cantonese and the Chinese dialects are. Though there is a lot of differences between these "dialects," it is taught in China that they are all part of the Chinese language. In India, there is no such conception of an "Indian" language. Even the language situation in Bombay confused me. Set in Maharashtra, the area traditionally spoke Marathi. However it seems that monolingual Marathi speakers are very much the exception now, "mostly fishermen," one of Komal's friends told me. Hindi seemed to be the language on the streets and in the media. However, certainly within Komal's circle of friends, English was far and away the most spoken language. In fact, one of her friends was an aspiring actor and taking "accent classes." When I asked him what was wrong with his accent, for his English seemed very good, he admitted that his Hindi was not where it should be and that he had a Hindi coach. Here I drew parallels to my knowledge of Hong Kong, where a similar colonial heritage has pushed English to its high status as the white collar and upper class language. However I don't think the situation is as similar as it would appear. In Hong Kong, many local kids who go to international school will speak English with an American or British accent and their international classmates will likely speak no Cantonese. Other locals may speak less fluent English and a large portion of the poor working class will speak little to no English. You either speak "mainstream" English, or you speak bad English. Hong Kong doesn't entirely have its own brand of English like Indian English. I believe the reason here is that in Hong Kong, English is used to communicate with the city's many Westerners, but communication with other Chinese will be done in Cantonese or Mandarin. In India, English is more than any other language the country's lingua franca, so there is plenty of communication with other Indians done in English. As a result, many street beggars came to me begging in English, which I hadn't heard in either Beijing or Hong Kong.

Decades of very different political rule has surely left other legacies upon China and India. I didn't see any of the slums in Bombay, but I still have the impression that the gap between the rich and poor is more pronounced in India than in China. I also definitely felt less safe in some parts of Bombay that I really ever have; for all its problems, Beijing is a surprisingly safe city.

Religious is perhaps the aspect of greatest divergence between China and India. It would be an oversimplification to say that organized religion had no effect on modern Chinese life, but compared to India that's almost a fair statement. The sheer number and visibility of religious groups in Bombay really struck me. When I was alone with Komal's driver, the few English words he knew were proper names common to Hindi and English. Thus he would point out temples to me: "Jain" as we drove past an unremarkable grey structure, "Farsi" as we glimpsed a somewhat hidden temple. Whether Sikh or Hindu or Muslim, citizens openly announced their religious beliefs with their clothing. Komal took me to a Hindu temple on my last day, possibly my strangest experience there. First she told me, "we'll have to take off our shoes, and they might get stolen." Luckily we found and paid someone to hold them for us. Then we walked up a densely populated hill, up curving stone steps that suddenly turned into old stone rooms filled with carved sculptures of different deities, ringing bells, chanting people in prayer, and flowers milk and dyes being poured on the sculptures in tribute. It was a lot to take in at one moment, and while I thought people would stare me out as a non-believer, nobody seemed to notice me. There was no exterior of the temple to speak of, for it seemed to have simply been built into the hill and the surrounding buildings. There were quiet pilgrims, loud adorers and some people in the corner who seemed to be studying texts. The scene was quite a lot to take in all at once.

Though it didn't seem like it at the time, I did and learned a lot in that short weekend. On Sunday I bought more souvenirs, including a keychain with my name in English and Devanagari, ate special Indian pizza with local spices (really delicious), natural ice cream, visited the Hindu temple and walked along the beach. It certainly was not nearly long enough to get any real grasp of what India was like and if I ever do return, I will make sure to stay at least a month. I think I could easily say that was the strangest or most interesting weekend of my life, but that didn't even begin to match the return trip...

Most Diverse Countries in the World

Editor's note: I began writing this post in 2010 and got through countries 10-6. I then got tired and left the piece, partially because it was a more daunting challenge that I was prepared to deliver, and that was that. Somehow this post has received more views than any other in my blog, probably because this is one of the biggest questions people curious about the world have. It's 2015 now and I've seen more of the countries on the list than before and have a much better understanding of their racial dynamics and the forces that created them, be they immigration, colonialism, or refugee migration. The world has also changed in those 5 years and countries have gotten more diverse. So I've actually shuffled the list. I've also realized it's probably possible to evaluate countries quantitatively. But I began this list much less sophisticated and so while I look at data, this is a qualitative approach mainly. So here's to editing this post.

What are the most diverse countries in the world? This has been a question I've been pondering for some time, and I was surprised by the lack of information about this on the internet. Thus, I have decided that even though I am completely unqualified, as usual, I will make this list myself.

The criteria is very tricky as diverse is a difficult term to define, and as I have explained in my post about Uyghurs, race is a socially constructed concept and therefore difficult to analyze in any absolute, scientific sense. But here I am basically looking at countries that have a lot of different cultures, races, and/or languages, both in absolute terms as well as in percentages, in addition to how well blended the different groups are with each other (aka segregation is not rewarded). Furthermore, the more different that these cultures are from each other, or to an impartial outsider, will have a huge factor.

To see what I mean with these factors, let's look at China, a country that did not make my list. The government states that there are 56 minority groups in China, including the Zhuang, Tibetans, Mongolians, Uyghurs and Uzbeks, as well as many you will never have heard of (the Bonan ring a bell?). There are actually probably even more minorities in China, because the government's classification is notoriously inaccurate and Wikipedia lists several "undistinguished minorities." Anyways, there are lots of different races, cultures and languages native to China. However, 92% of the population is Han Chinese, and probably a greater percentage speak Mandarin natively. Furthermore, many of those ethnic groups, while clearly distinct, may appear to outsiders to be Chinese, or at the very least Asian. Anyways, that 92% figure suggests a shockingly homogeneous country, and from personal experience living in Beijing, I did not feel like I was living in a diverse city. If a country's capital metropolis is not diverse, you'd have to assume that you'd be hard-pressed to find diversity anywhere. Now most of these groups have their own area, and so if you go to Urumqi you will see Han and Uyghurs living together, and back in August (2009), fighting against each other. This brings us to Chinese racism, which I felt was pretty prevalent and even institutionalized and thus I would not consider China a country of racial harmony. There are lots of Westerners and other foreigners living in China, but very few of these are citizens - most are there for a non-permanent stay. In China's defense, the Han majority does have a lot of diversity within it, which is obvious to anyone familiar with the cuisines of different provinces. Overall though, Chinese society is pluralistic and expansive, but not multicultural and diverse.

Despite that, large countries do feature strongly in this list. Colonialism is very influential in this list, an unfortunate cause for most of the world's diversity. I recognize the absurdity and pompousness of attempting to rank all the countries in the world and to do a shallow dive into their racial makeup and issues, especially with 4 countries on this list in which I have never set foot....but then again, it's my personal blog. 

10) Papua New Guinea
This country has to make the list because of its 850 indigenous languages and cultures. Not only is this number far more than any other country can boast, but it represents 12% of the Earth's human languages. Most of the groups are Papuan, in my opinion a very understudied large ethnic group, and many others are Polynesian, a more well-known pan-ethnicity and more recent inhabitant of the islands (recent meaning within 4000 years ago, in this context). The country has about 1% foreign born population, your typical mix of Australians, Americans, Brits, Filipinos and Chinese, so it isn't diverse in the sense that many of the countries on this list are. In addition, I don't think most of these 850 groups interact too much together, but I could be wrong. Either way, Papua New Guinea needs a mention because in one criteria, it is absolutely the most heterogeneous political entity mankind has ever known.

9) United Kingdom
I was surprised when I visited Europe how diverse it had become. My initial ignorant American perspective was that everyone there was white and that they would have no idea how to deal with other races. This is blatantly untrue nearly everywhere you go, and can be manifested in the fact that just about every large European city has black people and Chinese restaurants. In fact as my last blog posts in Ireland can attest to, you can find Chinese restaurants in obscure towns in the Irish countryside. True the demographic landscape is changing rapidly across Europe, but still in many European countries, large scale intercontinental immigration is relatively new. These countries have generally been slow to internalize these foreigners, with many countries slow to shed nation-state imagined histories and adopt pluralistic identities. I noticed in Ireland that while being Chinese was not a huge surprise, being a native English speaking Chinese was. Two large exceptions in Europe exist: France and the United Kingdom. I give the nod to the UK here because the country has more groups from a wider geographic range, and because it has had fewer well-publicized incidents of racism (I'm referring to the Burqa affair in France). The UK, and especially London, has significant populations of people from India, Pakistan, China (Hong Kong), Singapore, Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Jamaica, Guyana, Trinidad & Tobago, and many other West Indies. On the other hand, the country is 85% White British, and 92% White. Of the non-British Whites, the UK has a lot of people from continental Europe, especially from Poland and Scandinavia, as well as from the US, Australia, Canada, Ireland and New Zealand (the Anglophone world). Within the White British, I need to add that there is some diversity there too, between the Irish, Scots and Welsh, and Welsh is still a vibrant first language.

A good test I like to do when seeing how well a country has incorporated its immigrants is whether it has any minority celebrities. I can think of Jay Sean, Naomi Campbell, Leona Lewis and Katie Leung off-hand, so the UK passes this test.

8) India
India makes this list in the same vein as Papua New Guinea. The enormous country boasts over two thousand ethnic groups and several hundred languages, including a shocking 29 with over a million native speakers. Perhaps the most impressive thing though, at least to a linguistic nerd like me, is the diversity within these languages. All four major language families are present in India. Indo-European is the big one, which here includes Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, as well as English. Dravidian is also immensely present, in Telegu, Tamil and Kannada and is mainly restricted to this subcontinent. The Munda languages are of the same Austronesian family that includes Cambodian Khmer and Vietnamese. Some Sino-Tibetan languages, the family group that includes Chinese, are also present in India in some random languages that I know nothing about. There is even a language isolate in India called Nihali. I make such a big fuss about language families because they represent vast diversity - languages from different families are essentially completely unrelated, making it much harder to learn languages from different families. The entire continent of Europe is almost exclusively Indo-European with a few rare exceptions - India is arguably more linguistically diverse than Europe. In addition, India has a rich religious history and has significant worshipers of all the major religions, notably Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Sikhism and Buddhism. Data on ethnic groups in India is not available but from what I can tell, foreign-born population is pretty negligible, at least as a percentage of India's billion-plus.

7) Canada
While doing research for this post, Canada was the country that surprised me the most.  When I think of Canada and the Canadians I know, I generally think of white people, who generally act like marginalized Americans but occasionally say "eh."  However, statistics show that about 20% of the 20 million+ Canadians are "visible minorities."  This includes 4% South Asian, 3.9% Chinese, 2.5% Black and a surprising 3.8% Native American, or as they call it, First Nations. Several Canadian minorities are familiar to the American public, including Russell Peters, Kristen Kreuk, Donovan Bailey and Jim Carrey, who is his own race.  Canada's diversity is best reflected in its cities, especially Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal.  One vignette demonstrating this involves my friend Vicki from Vancouver whose parents are from Vietnam, but was raised to speak Cantonese because of the proliferation of that language within Vancouver.  Toronto is perhaps one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world, and Montreal is legitimately bilingual.  This summer on our family vacation there, I noticed that in addition the diversity that you might find in any Northeast American city, Montreal also had many immigrants from Martinique, Haiti and Algeria, basically Francophone countries whose people you might not meet in many parts of the English-speaking world.

6) United Arab Emirates
The UAE is a difficult country to place.  Unlike most of the countries on this list, the native and politically dominant ethnic group is a minority in the country. It is only 16.5% Emirati with an additional 23% non-Emirati Arab or Persian.  Instead, South Asians make up half the population.  In fact, the extravagant city of Dubai is 51% Indian, 15% Pakistani and 10% Bangladeshi.  Then there's 8% of the nation's population that is other, chiefly Europeans and East Asians. Though I couldn't find the figures, there's reportedly a strong continent of Filipinos, Chinese and Malaysians.  It shouldn't be surprising that the UAE is also very religiously diverse. Perhaps the least Muslim of the Islamic states, the UAE has a large population of Christians, Sikhs and Buddhists.  However, the country's diversity is reportedly not very well integrated.  The Emirati minority controls the country's oil wealth and the expatriate population not working in the city's financial sector is mainly employed as migrant labor.  Thus one can interpret the UAE as a class-based society with strong racial components attached. Similar dynamics exist in Doha in Qatar or Manama in Bahrain.

5) Australia
Though 90% of the country is of European descent, I would argue that Australia is one of the most diverse countries in the world. A jaunt through Sydney would reveal quarters of Lebanese, Italian, Chinese, Greek, Vietnamese, Filipino and Indian life. More than 75% of Australians identify with a heritage outside of Australia, including still active migrations from England and New Zealand. From a British penal colony with a disproportionate amount of Scots and Irish to a massive Southeast/Central European migration post World War II, Australia has always been a country with lots of land and not enough people to fill it. They've actively encouraged immigration for much of their history, although it must be noted an incredibly racist "White Australia" policy was only struck down in 1972. The 2011 census found that 27% of the country is born overseas (1st generation Australians) and another 20% are their offspring (2nd generation Australians). Australia has a very well rounded immigrant pool, with no other nationality or language being second dominant, the way Spanish would be in the US.

Is it more diverse than the UK? I'd have to believe so. The massive migration history would see to that. But if one were unaware of this backdrop, Australia might not seem so diverse. Apparently the Australian Census doesn't count race, asking instead ancestry. It's not really kosher to extrapolate, but if you want to ask "how White is Australia?" the census ancestry numbers and other figures I found would say 85-92%. How about the indigenous community? Including people of mixed race, the Aboriginal Australians make up 2.5% of the country.

4) Mauritius
This island in the Indian Ocean is really isolated and small, but somehow that hasn't hurt its immigration. Technically in Africa, the country is bilingual English and French and in crude colors boasts a white, black, brown and yellow populace.Without any indigenous habitation before the European Age of Discovery, Mauritius luckily lacks a brutal history of native decimation by war or germs. After a brief claiming by the Dutch, the islands were governed by the French for nearly 100 years before being conquered by the British in 1810 after fierce battles for the key Indian Ocean port. The French had imported slaves from Africa and Madagascar who were freed in 1835. As a big plantation economy, the British then imported lots of indentured laborers, as they did so often, from India. After gaining independence in 1968, Mauritius democratically elected a string of Hindu Prime Ministers save one Caucasian of French descent. Despite over two hundred years without French rule, French is still widespread. In fact, it seems nearly everyone is fluent in French, English and Mauritian Creole (French based), and a good chunk in an Indian or Chinese language. Official demographic statistics are not kept by the country, and are probably difficult given that intermarriages have been common for nearly two centuries. Nonetheless, I found estimates for 68% Indo-Mauritian, 28% "Creole" (likely having at least some African ancestry), 3% Chinese, and 2% Caucasian. About 5% speak Bhojpuri as their native language, which is considered a dialect of Hindi in India. The country is also extremely diverse religiously, reporting 48% Hindu, 26% Roman Catholic, 17% Muslim and 6% other Christian among the 1.7 million inhabitants.

3) Malaysia
I originally had Singapore #3 in my list, but I've straight up replaced it with Malaysia in the rewrite, to the horror of my Singaporean roommate. But with my travels since 2010 particularly in this past year, I don't have any choice but to readjust my previously ignorant rankings. While Singapore is also extremely diverse, its situation (and that of Brunei and Indonesia to an extent) is related to that of Malaysia and so I will let this spot speak for all of the former states of Malaya and relegate Singapore to the honorable mention list.

Considering its inclusion in the country's name, it might surprise you to learn that ethnic Malays make up exactly half of the country. 50.1%! Ethnic Chinese make up a quarter of the country, Indians  another 7% with fair amounts of other South Asians from Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh represented as well. I've gone into more in-depth with the diverse Chinese community in Malaysia (http://cal337.blogspot.hk/2015/01/strait-thuggin-it.html). The Indian community is majority South Asian with Tamil the lingua franca, but Punjabis are also in Malaysia in large numbers. The other 17% or so includes ethnic groups related to Malays but consider themselves distinct, and many, many groups indigenous to the peninsula or islands who are not related to Malays. I thought Malaysia was diverse enough when I'd visited Kuala Lumpur, but when I visited East Malaysia, I realized I'd only scratched the surface. East Malaysia is much less ethnically Malay, with many groups collectively called Orang Asli. I don't know the intricacies of theese groups and won't embarrass myself trying, but just in Kota Kinabalu I ran into many Kadazan and Iban people. Furthermore I've met many Malays with a mixed heritage, seemingly to a larger extent than one sees in Indian and Chinese diaspora communities worldwide. And while sure there are ethnic enclaves in places, and cities like Penang (and Singapore) are overwhelmingly Chinese, my experience in Malaysia has been that there is a ton of true diversity. There are lots of people getting along with each other in English and Malay and learning bits of each other's ancestral cultures, while retaining their own. This is counter to the experience typical of western countries, where immigrant languages disappear over a generation or two. Nonetheless, the government is still Malay-dominated, often making discriminatory social and religious policies. Many of Malaysia's wealthy class are Indian and Chinese, which sometimes leads to ethnic tensions. Malaysia has a long way to go in racial harmony, for sure, but the sheer diversity of its population helps a lot.

2) Brazil
The only Lusophone country in South America has probably seen the most racial mixing to the extent that race discussions in Brazil are simply different. It doesn't make any sense to view things in the same lens that you would anywhere I've ever lived. Four continents are needed to trace the ancestry of most of the 200 million Brazilians have. Amerinidians have inhabited Brazil since 9000 B.C., and there remain tribes in the Amazon uncontacted by outside societies. The Portuguese started coming in the 1500s and brought over lots of African slaves. In fact, 37% of the African slave victims of the transatlantic slave trade ended up in Brazil. Then starting in the late 19th century, large migrations came pouring in from Italy, Spain, Germany, Japan, Syria and Lebanon. Now Brazil has the most people of Japanese descent outside of Japan, one of the cities with the largest population of African descent (Salvador). While only 0.4% of Brazilians consider themselves Amerindian, genetic studies estimate that over 30% of the country (60 million) have at least one Amerinidian ancestor. Then there are Pardo Brazilians

1) United States
Of course I would have my home country #1 right? To be honest

Honorable Mentions: Singapore, France, South Africa, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Turkey, Fiji, Myanmar.