How South Asian American Keshav Mukund Bhide Blamed His Short Stature and Race On His Lack Of Success With Dating Women

When all the news about the killer Elliot Rodger started to just pour through the internet channels months ago, I chose not to say anything. The story that was been unraveled showed a deeply disturbed young man who had many things that kept on building up in his life. The number of things which made him upset eventually pushed him past a point of emotional no return. When Rodger wrote his super-long manifesto, he threw the blame on his unfair life on everything that he could…

• There was of course his height, which some people say can range from 5′ 6″-5’9″
• There was the fact that he was half Asian, or not purely “white”. He had huge issues with ‘race’.
• There was the issue that his mother and father divorced and remarried
• He resented his old friend and even younger siblings from getting relationships

I didn’t want to write just another piece on this kid since it would have been a waste and just collected dust along with the thousands of other articles written to interpret his actions and try to make sense of his intentions through reading his manifesto. To say the least, that thing was cringeworthy. Rodger was not able to deal with reality.

Since this website was created to help people with their short stature and height issues, the question to ask is this…

“If Rodger, was at a height which he considered acceptable, would he have reached the point where he would have gone through with the shooting?”

First, the young Elliot was very narcissistic, and felt extremely entitled. His self-absorbed attitude made him think that everything should be given to him in life. His delusion in thinking that he deserved to win the lottery showed that he was way out of touch with reality.

If Rodger was instead maybe 6′ 4″-6’5″, his sense of self-entitlement and self-worth would have been even worse, but he probably would have not been bullied on and picked on as much. People don’t go into shooting rampages because they have too much narcissism. They love themselves too much to do that, and would realize that they would hurt themselves later on, which they would have kept themselves in check. People go into angry shooting rampages when they 1) feel like they have been wronged and want to take revenge for some previous insult, or slight, and 2) when they feel like they have nothing to lose and/or live for. Rodger’s anger is a combination of more than just one thing.

• There was his bullying, and beatings
• There was his inability to attract the type of women he wanted.
• There is the envy, jealous, resentment, and spite he felt against his relatives and friends who got into relationships which made him even more angry.

What would have worked for a personality like Rodger was to find something in himself which he could have felt self-worth from. You use his own egotistical tendencies to block his anger. I believe that if Rodger was taller, he would have been able to at least latch onto his tall stature into his self perception of identity and ride that part of himself, to a state in his life where he would have at least not slipped further.

My thinking is this: if he was bigger, other kids his age would not have picked on him as much, and not tried to take advantage of his short stature and physically assault him so much. The beatings would have dropped, unless he was the type of idiot who would provoke other men of his age into confrontation. This meant that the anger and the desire to get revenge against guys who hurt him before would have not been there. With a large stature, his presence alone with have given him an edge at least in terms of first impressions. He would still have gotten angry at people of course.

That is why I believe, in my own very limited perspective, that Rodger’s actions could have been prevented if only he was taller (Of course I am biased about that issue). His actions could have also been prevented if he just accidentally “got lucky” and had sex just once or maybe even had just one kiss from a willing girl. If he lost his virginity, he would have stopped being so sexually frustrated. If he was bigger, a certain minority of superficial women would have at least looked past his horrible personality long enough for him to at least have sex. . Of course, we will never know now.

His problems are the typical type of problems any normal teenage or young adult male has to go through. In all the countries around the world, millions of young boys will through the exact same phase in life as he, and most of those young men will be struggling through the exact same set of personal problems just like him. Issues of sex, masturbation, acne & pimples, attracting the opposite sex, masculinity issues, etc. It is just that Rodger kept going deeper and deeper into the hole, and he did not have something to latch on to. Most guys who go through it find groups that they can join so share in that common bond. The out-of-date stereotypical high school nerd who went to college a virgin would find other guys like him, would become intellectual lords in university, find kindred spirits who shared their passions, and get a chance to meet women later in life. For Rodger, he just slipped past the cracks, and the multiple filters we put into society to prevent people from falling too far. There was nothing to catch him from falling. The truth is that in society, there will always be people who will fall through the cracks, and there is no system that we can create that will prevent that. There is probably millions of guys right now who feel the same way as Rodger, who have the same level of anger, frustration, and resentment, and feel that life is frustrated. Most of them will not be able to buy a gun, or get their hands on a weapon, or are too afraid to go through with an act of revenge. However, once in a while, when all the factors align just right in the most horrible way, a madman with the resources, motives, and will pops up.

This is how we come across another young teenager man who suffered similar issues as Rodger. His name is Keshav Mukund Bhide, a former student at the University of Washington. We found multiple articles written about this kid who posted on certain Youtube channels who believed that Elliot’s actions were right and wanted to repeat them.

Bhide’s problems stemmed from his identity issues as well, but much more so. For Keshav, it was his short stature, and his ethnicity. He also blamed factors that is out of his control in his lack of success with the opposite sex. He thinks that if he was just taller and maybe not south asian (maybe caucasian?), he would have achieved some success with women. His issues a South Asian-American Male is similar to what many other minority males complain about as well. Of course, when they are so young, there just aren’t that many options for them. (Thank god that the FBI and other federal enforcement officials caught this guy on time so that we don’t have another massacre.) If there was some type of miracle pill that would make them taller, of course they’d try to get it. But there isn’t. If there was some easy way for them to get blue eyes and blond hair, and change their skin color, they probably would do it too. I am sorry to say but often life is unfair. Feeling the overwhelming unfairness of life is quite normal, especially when you are young, have no money, feel powerless, and are filled with too much hormones and don’t know how to channel all that repressed sexual energy.

From what I learned in the one Gender Studies course I took in my undergraduate studies, many children of immigrant families as well as biracial children have huge identity issues. They find themselves often trapped in more than one identity, and more than one world. They don’t know how to balance the various aspects of their identity, obligations, and their responsibilities.

When they reach of the age where dating, hormones, and puberty starts, things get even more complicated. For guidance, maybe they only know from the culture that they were born into and raised in. They aspire to be or date what is considered beautiful in the movies and the media. Not everyone can be the outdated versions of beauty that was set in the USA 50 years ago, when most of everyone was “white” with blue eyes and blonde hair. Those types of people in the western nations are slowly being breed out of existence, as the older immigrant ethnicities intermarry with the newer immigrants. It is time for the Indians to date the Chinese, the Filipinos to date the Mexicans, the Iranians to date the Russians, the Jamaicans to date the Cubans, the Somalians to date the Thais. We have to expand our perception of what is considered beautiful in the world, because the honest truth is that we all have completely outdated facts and beliefs on how the world really is.

Look, I get why guys like Rodgers and Bhide feel the way they do. Some of these guys are just trolls who vent their anger and frustration out onto the internet and poison whatever they touch, but in the real world, they are too afraid to take action for what they threaten online. For a very small minority of others, they actually go through with it. That is when things get scary.

If I could talk to Bhide, I would tell him that being young, small in size, and part of a ethnicity which is not traditionally been considered attractive is something that will take time to accept. His desire to hurt women who would not give him the type of self-gratification he desires is not the right type of emotion to go to. It might be that these types of guys have also a problem with Impulse Control, which means that there needs to be programs in school to help younger people deal with their impulses. I would love to give these guys who might suffer from a body dysmorphic height complex an easy solution, but there is none. However, I will promise that I will be there for them and help them out whenever I can. That is why this website was created, to help and to give hope to those