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Rohinton Mistry leaves US tour halfway

Novelist Rohinton Mistry is sick and tired of facing "unbearable" humiliation at the hands of US customs and so out of disgust he has cancelled his tour of America halfway.

In the face of racial profiling following the September 11 attacks, "a brown skin and a beard are not a felicitous combination", he told the Globe and Mail daily.

So, he told his publishers Alfred A Knopf, that he was fed up. The writer cancelled his tour to Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, Salt Lake city, Utah, Iowa City and Madison, Wisconsin.

"He has been extremely unhappy about the way he has been treated in airports around the US in the first half of the tour," a representative of Alfred A Knopf was quoted as saying in the front-page report.

"As a person of colour he was stopped repeatedly and rudely at each airport along the way... to the point where the humiliation for both he and his wife has become unbearable."

The US Immigration and Naturalisation Services recently stated that all people, irrespective of their citizenship, who were born in West Asia will be fingerprinted and photographed while entering the US. To this list they added Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. So all Canadians born in these countries will also be subject to this kind of special attention.

Indo-Canadian Federal Minister of Natural Resources, Herb Dhaliwal, calls the policy racist.

"We are seeing the ugly face of America and it is simply unacceptable," Dhaliwal was quoted as saying. "All fair-minded Canadians will be very angered by this. And for a country that speaks about human rights and democracy, it's totally outrageous."

"He just said that he had a terrible time travelling in the US. He was really very upset," Mistry's New York publisher Sony Mehta, who was in Toronto for a conference of authors, was quoted as saying.

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