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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   18566 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 21, 2025

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What is a pajeet? Urbandictionary has it variously as a slur which could refer to Canadian Sikhs, north Indians, Hindus, Indians in general, or any South Asian.

In India, people use it to refer to anyone who belongs to the underclass or acts like they are a member of it. It started as a slur for sikhs via 4chan. It is used as a catch-all for south asians who act in a way befitting a slur, which is most of this place, unfortunately.

To everyone outside the subcontinent it is used as a generic racial slur against Indians and other subcontinentals. There is no distinction whatsoever between the ones who look and act a certain way or different castes/classes which makes your usage of the term risible. It’s like an Israeli from some small Jewish sect calling other Jewish sect kikes. “Ah those Neturei Karta KIKES are at it again! Not like us noble Breslov Hasidim! Don’t you know this slur has always referred to the BAD Jews?”

Yeah, I don't fully agree and jews themselves exist in distinct groups. Asheknazis are different from sephadrics.

A jew using the word kike and me using it are different things, ditto for pajeet. There is an underclass and it now has a collective name.

And all this happened because Sikhs, telugus and some others abused the living shit out of the migration system so bad that anyone sane would vote for remigration. The people whose antics got the word coined are a good chunk even within the west. This is a terrible thing because most people cannot differentiate between a hard working lawyer who migrated on his own from some city in Himachal vs a guy who got there through illicit means.

I should not be using the word as much, I think you're right now that I think about it.

I guess this is how American southerners feel about being called 'Yankees'.

"...you fucking kikes are making us Jews look bad!" (c) a joke about Jews.

I've heard it also works for black people.

Indeed, there is a whole Chris Rock bit from the 90s where he talks about "there's black people, and there's niggas. And niggas have got to go". Anecdotally, I would say that matches my experience. My wife and her family really do not like the dumb-ass black people who make them look bad by association.

It’s less effective as a joke when OP uses it unironically and when you consider he constantly mentions his caste and noble family connections in between (and sometimes even within) sad posts about his chronic unemployment and overall underachievement. He’s been doing this for years across various accounts with little self-awareness.

That's not an unfair view of things. I have had issues but I'm not crossing borders illegally, posting rape threats or staring at girls on the street. My descriptions here paint a far worse picture because I have a hard time appreciating anything decent in life.

Same goes for my employment issues, I chose to take time off to learn more things than my peers because I wouldn't have found the same line of employment where one hates showing up to office and knows nothing beyond leet code questions to be worthwhile, I did the equivalent of that in college. My sabbatical isn't ideal, but I did the right thing.

I should not use the word as muc,h though, slurs are not nice to use. Indians have a much worse image now than before, having slurs that for people of the subcontinent isn't good in such scenarios.

Also, I mentioned the faint previous ties to say that my analysis of the issue had some indirect inputs from people who were relevant at one point in time. The mentions of caste and other details exist to provide context for whatever is here. I don't go around driving with a "Brahmin" or equivalent sticker on my car. Castes are more or less dead in many ways beyond marriage. I do care about castes but that is a private matter.

It is completely fucking wild to me that some random 4chan slur gets adopted by it's target nation for their own underclass. Is this widespread? Is it just their westernized too online NEET class? I must know more.

I actively played a role in this unfortunately, twitter is the only place where you find any semblance freedom, though it's still terrible, pajeet twitter became a thing.

Indians, the upper classes have always seen themselves as different people from the underclass, so Sikhs being the target of the slur and it being used people around them had an impact. It's not a popular term at all but it will be.

4chan is undefeated, check out bharatchan.com for more info

I haven't been out of India for even a year now, and I can promise you I've never heard anyone call anyone else a Pajeet in real life, nor online. OP has a rather unusual online circle.

Some people picked it from me, it's not used as much now but it'll be soon. My online circle is quite unusual tho lol

Subcontinentals are extremely classist (which is funny because virtually all of them, even those highly educated Model Minority types far outearning Westerners, remain lower-class-coded in the Western mind) so it's no wonder they found a catchy slur appropriate.

“Pajeet” is not a real Indian name, but that's really a nitpick because there are tons of legitimate names that are very similar. I sometimes interact with people called something like “Rajeet Patel” and it's a bit awkward how I can't not associate them with 4chan memes.

Subcontinent has extreme levels of scarcity. The big tragedy here is not that the vast majority of people are a part of the underclass, it's that the elites behave just like them.

People gauge your class by how fluent or non Indian sounding your English is. Hell, even the sports people watch reflect their class. Richer ones who are not completely dehati will watch f1 as cricket is seen as a lower class thing.

The Jeet thing is quite funny, a guy literally named winnerjeet singh was a meme a few years ago because he got 3 votes in an election in Punjab.

OP is Indian (and, it must be clarified, is living in India), and is using pajeet in the urban dictionary sense, referring to old people in his country as “boomer pajeets.”

OP is semi-playfully referring to his co-nationals as pajeets simply because he’s proficient in English and very online (in the wojack memer sense).

The term originates from the fact that latinized Indian names often follow a distinctive convention for vowel sounds, for example characteristically going for the double-e instead of what we might be used to from another European language: pajeet instead of pajit. Or Navdeep instead of Navdip. Also Pooja and Preeti. There are plenty of exceptions, no easier to read aloud without pausing (Srinivas). I don’t believe this is really documented anywhere, but this is the best through-line I can come up with for the origin.

It just originates from people noticing the Jeet suffix in Punjabi names.

Pajeet was an Indian name that happened to be used in a 4chan meme about "designated shitting streets" (itself a variation of a comic making fun of Turkish claims to steppe nomad heritage), and the name just stuck.

I don't think it's an actual name, it just sounds like one.

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