We get all worked up every time China claims Arunachal Pradesh for itself. But the way we treat our own people from the Northeast, it is a wonder that all the seven states have still not acceded to China or gone solo; or that China hasn't claimed all seven with some confidence.

The rape and killing of the Naga girl by allegedly a sex fiend IIT Delhi scholar is just another in a very long line of attacks on northeastern women. One may argue that a sex-obsessed man would not make distinction of races, but why not? There's no evidence to suggest that he raped and killed any other person.

But what probably hurts much more than the fatal extremes like this one or the Mumbai Gateway attack is the daily, slow-fire humiliation at ticket counters, hostels, campuses, offices and a hundred other places.

And why? If we refuse to call somebody our own just on the evidence of narrow eyes, then we should not have a problem if Arunachal or all the Seven Sisters go to China.

Accent? Yes, in the Elphinstone College hostel there used to be jokes about "sex in the bus" at the Assam-Arunachal border read "checks" but then, I would be ragged about the English alphabet for Bengalis starting with "A for orange", or a Maharashtrian for making "lou, phaiou times a week".

But a Maharashtrian or a Bengali is spared the insult of being viewed as an outsider; the girls are not seen as easy lay.

Indians from the plains have a cultural problem dealing with a certain "chilled-out" aura about northeasterners their being relatively relaxed about interacting with the other sex, the hilly frankness, the awesomeness with which most of them play a Guns 'N' Roses riff on the guitar.