Indian-Origin Cambridge Student Faces Racist Outburst in United Kingdom

An Indian-origin student from Cambridge University was told in a racist outburst by a middle-aged white man in the United Kingdom to “go home” following a row in a doctor’s waiting room.

Rickesh Advani, 28, confronted the man when he made suggestive lewd remarks to a woman in the waiting room of Cornford House Surgery in Cambridge. Advani managed to film the row where the man can be seen saying “Brexit, go home,” Mail online reported.

He took to the social media to post the video.

When the man was asked to explain the comments he made, he reportedly replied, “So what?” The man added, “It’s all over the TV, you lot are always making trouble,” according to the report.

After the row escalated, Advani demanded that the police be called in. He went out of the surgery to make a call to the police as none of the other patients stepped in. “The comments and absolute disdain in his voice were what got to me and I couldn’t stand for her to believe no one cared as I would hate my partner coming home and telling me that happened and worse that no one cared enough to defend her,” Advani was quoted as saying by Cambridge News.

He added that he was shocked with what he had heard and said that he could not believe that people living in this era can be so bigoted. “At the very first opportunity I told him to politely stop and hoped that would be the end of it. Any reasonable human in that situation would have accepted his wrong but he became unnecessarily aggressive to me,” he was quoted as saying by Daily Mail.

The Cornford House Surgery later apologized to Advani in a letter. “I would like to apologize for our handling of the racial abuse you received on that day. My colleague mentioned that you felt you were unfairly treated as you (were made to feel) that you were the guilty party, when you had, quite rightly, stood up for another member of the public,” Simon Gridley, a manager at the surgery, said in the letter, as per Daily Mail.

Gridley added that they wanted to defuse the situation before it went out of the hand, “I deeply regret that the way we did this made you feel like you had done something wrong,” Gridley stated in the letter, adding that they did not possess the authority to forcibly remove or detain a person unless they commit an act of physical violence or aggression. “Thus, we could not force the other person into a separate room,” he said.

In the past, Advani ran a charity offering help to the homeless and unemployed people so they could get back on their feet. He was also once homeless and later transformed his life and is now a student at the Cambridge University, according to the report.