[Photo: Mr Jayasanka Bagpelli speaking on his phone as he and his friends maintain a vigil outside the Royal Melbourne Hospital where their friend and fellow student Sravan Kumar Theerthala is fighting for his life, after being stabbed with a screwdriver at a Melbourne party on May 29.]

By LINGAM PONNAMPALAM
Reporting from Melbourne

AS AN Indian living in Melbourne, I was concerned this week - not afraid, but concerned.

By dint of luck and circumstance, my life does not intersect with those of the victims of the recent attacks. Geography distances us: I live in the inner-east, while much of the violence occurs in the western suburbs. Economics separates us: I don't commute from work late at night when the threat of violence hangs thick in the air.

And most importantly, I do not wear the hallmarks of a new arrival from the subcontinent, conspicuously different in manner, dress, intonations and mores - a difference that is alleged to have irked a small segment of Melbourne's broadly tolerant society.

Looking back, this week has been a long time coming. The Indian press in Melbourne has been reporting attacks on Indian students as far back as two years ago. Victorian police statistics released on

June 2 showed that for 2007/08, 1,447 people of Indian origin were victims of crimes against the person, such as robberies and assaults. This rose from 1,082 in the previous year. These people account for about

4 per cent of all victims.

Talk to some Indian students and they will insist this is the tip of the iceberg, with many other incidents going unreported. Initially and, some argue, for too long, the police maintained that the violence was not racially motivated - simply opportunistic attacks on "soft targets" by hardened thugs. The term soft targets has angered the Indian community, but there is some truth to it.

Travelling alone late at night to the ends of Melbourne's sprawl after long days at university and long nights working as cleaners, security staff or taxi drivers, these students are easy prey. They often carry laptops, mobile phones, maybe a hundred dollars - ripe for the picking by adolescent louts moonlighting as petty criminals.

Digging deeper, racism seems a convenient but inaccurate excuse for problems. Disinformation conspires with social and economic factors, compounded by the absence of a concerted effort to accommodate the new visitors, and points to a systemic problem that finds its roots back in India.

Many students relate accounts of unscrupulous education agents wooing hapless students Down Under with the promise of safe streets, cheap living, unlimited work rights and abundant opportunities. The reality is far less alluring. Many tell of brokers misrepresenting the courses offered and the fees incurred, of coming to Melbourne to enrol in colleges staffed by unqualified teachers who accept kickbacks for an upgrade of marks.

With Indian students bringing more than A$2 billion ($2.32b) to the A$15.5 billion tertiary education industry in Australia, the country's third largest export, greater transparency and closer regulation is vital.

Then there is the shortage of rental accommodation in the inner city, as well as a dearth of on-campus accommodation, which sends new arrivals to the inexpensive and often disadvantaged fringes of Melbourne to contend with the attendant problems of crime and violence. Couple this with the significantly higher costs of living, reportedly glossed over by the dubious education brokers, and many students are forced to hang on to poorly paid part-time jobs late into the night, on top of full-time studies.

At the same time, a rising tide of drunken disorderliness and violence affects all Melbournians, regardless of colour or creed. The authorities have ramped up efforts to quell this problem with increased police presence around hotspots, improved regulation and stiffer penalties. Still, these distinct but conflated issues, bearing upon people who are visibly different, make for an explosive cocktail, as the past week has proven.

The response from the students has been marked - they took the streets of downtown Melbourne for 14 hours and hurled rocks at the iconic clock-tower of Flinders Street Station to demonstrate their deep frustration, a not-so Gandhian expression of civil disobedience.

For nine years, I've lived in this city without issue or incident. Now I am a man of Indian extraction in a country where the glare of the public scrutiny is trained on the 200,000 Indians living and working within its borders. And by dint of skin-colour, which no amount of circumstance can change, I have become conspicuous.

I'm older, more self-assured and keenly aware of my legal rights to recourse. But to all intents and purposes, I could be just another "curry" in a simmering pot that's threatening to boil over.

Lingam Ponnampalam, 38, is a media professional from Singapore living and working in Melbourne.