Indian-origin doctor's viral bindi video sparked an online backlash that she had never seen in her life: 5 other times Indians faced similar rhetoric in recent years

Being an Indian in the United States is no longer a point of diversity and celebration. Instead, openly revealing your Indian identity might get you attacked on the streets and targeted online. This isn't just a hypothesis, but a proven statement. A 2026 survey by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace examined the attitudes of the roughly 5.2 million Indian-Americans living in US. As per the survey, since the start of 2025, one in four Indian Americans have been called a slur. The survey also noted that one in five respondents shied away from wearing their religious identities such as bindis and tilaks in public.Those who still do, are targeted enough to inspire them to withhold wearing their identity in public. A case in point is an Indian-origin doctor in the US who faced racist comments on social media over wearing a bindi. In an Instagram video, Dr Karishma Reddy, a board-certified plastic surgeon with a following of 23K on Instagram, shared an incident from one of her rural rotations as a medical student studying at the College of Georgia.She was seeing a patient for diabetes when his wife asked her why she wore a dot (bindi). "Before I could even explain, her husband...