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It is a slur. I treat slurs the same as I treat any other kind of profanity, they spice up a sentence, and are useful to express or portray a particular slant or implication in a story. "Bob and Alice made love" is a rather different image than "Bob fucked Alice;" even though they are mechanically the same act. In the same way, "This store was in a black neighborhood" is different than "This store was full of niggers;" even though they're pretty similar phrases. I could refer to the same friend of mine accurately as white working class, or as a trailer trash redneck; the same person, different implications. A person might refer to me walking into Wawa for a coffee as a white guy, a middle aged white dweeb, or a faggot yuppie fuck getting a whipped cream latte. All would be accurate enough.
In this particular case, I use the word pajeet to refer to motel owners/operators and their cousins they imported to clerk precisely, not as a general article of hatred for Indians. I rather love Indians. By using the word Pajeet, I'm using the connotations of the word to paint a picture in the reader's mind: the motel operation is primarily extractive, with minimal effort put in to things like reputation or avoiding scandal, they don't take a ton of pride in the operation and just want to make as much money with as little effort as possible. Where a native owner might think of themselves as an upstanding member of the community and be suspicious of a married executive they see around, an Indian just doesn't care, there's no connection to care about what the YTs are up to. I use the connotations of the word Pajeet to bring that aspect to the fore, the foreigner, separate from the community.
Perhaps, much like other profanity, I shouldn't use slurs, or at least should use them rarely. But I suppose I'm juvenile enough to still find them both useful and amusing.
Thank you for the detailed answer. I suspected you in particular weren't just sloshing words around without having considered what you were writing. I'm not sure your intention hit with me, but maybe did with others.
It might have something to do with you living in Japan for however long, where you are the minority, while I sit provincially in Wawa country, confident enough to fly to Japan to see you and say "Wow, look at all these minorities they got around here!"
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