Two incidents first - both occurred during my onsite visits:
a. I recently went to the US for a project and met a person, who was working as a contractor for Wipro. One day, we started talking and were just sharing details about each other. This person (I will call him X) asked me about my family, where I grew up etc and started talking about himself. X was supposedly from a souther state but had been born and brought up in Bombay. According to him, he thought people from the south are narrow minded etc, but since he grew up in Bombay, he was very broad-minded and open etc. He continued to talk in this vein for some more time.
I usually, don’t like to get into arguments over opinions and simply listened.
The funny part was, after a few weeks in the project, he used to comment on other team members. The comments, usually abusive, would always refer to the person’s state !! ‘He is a Bengali na, that is why he is behaving like this ! He is from Andhra, and all people from Andhra are like this.’ No state seemed good enough for him. People from every state seemed to have some flaw or the other in their nature. When I commented on it, he said, ‘Yes I am biased and I am a racist. I am not a hypocrite and thats why I comment on such things openly !!’
b. This incident happened over 5 years ago and it was during my first on site visit. I had been in the US for hardly a week at that time and had no friends there. I was the first and only person from India in the client place and I met up with a guy-A from India there, through some of my relatives in India. A called me up one day, and told me that his friend’s mother had come from India and that all of them were going for a dinner in an Indian restaurant and generously offered to take me also along.
This friend (lets call him Y), too, had grown up in Bombay, although he was originally from Punjab. It was the first time I was meeting Y and his mother. After the usual round of introductions, Y’s mother asked me where I was from and I replied - ‘Chennai’. Immediately she said - ‘Chennai is such a horrible place. We have heard that it is full of frauds. My son worked there for a few months and absolutely hated the place’ and so on !!
Now, I was younger then and hot-blooded too. I immediately started defending my city and told her that each person’s experience was different and that I had been conned by a Taxi driver in Mumbai a few months back etc. Then I slowly diverted them from this topic and moved on to neutral topics.
Y and I used to talk once in a while. Y had a room mate from Bangalore and Y used to taunt him all the time. That was the time, a movie called ‘The sum of all fears’ released in the US. The movie was about an imaginary situation, where an atomic bomb is dropped over Baltimore and the whole city is destroyed. Y was scared out of his wits, since he was worried that a similar thing would happen in Mumbai too. He used to tell me that he used to argue with his room-mate that people in the south have nothing to worry, since if India is under attack, Mumbai is the first place that will be hit, since it is the commercial center of India.
Now my whole point of writing this rather lengthy blog is this: Every day we talk about religious divides and caste divides, but never about this regional divide. At what point are we taught to treat people from other states with distrust? First there is the North-South divide and then within the South, the divide between different states and within states, between cities and so on.
At least when you are away from India, shouldn’t we be thinking as Indians, rather than fight over which state is better and which is not? During my last visit, I had a female colleague whose first question to a new joinee from India, would be - ‘Are you a south Indian?’ She would start every statement with ‘You south Indians’ !! She would ask weird questions like ‘How can you South Indians have rice for lunch? Rice makes me sleepy’ and so on. Initially I used to get irritated, later I started making fun of her about the same point.
It is the job of Indian politicians to create a divide amongst the Indian population over the name of religion, caste, language etc and understandably, the uneducated will fall for it. But what about us, the so-called literate and well-traveled etc, whose outlook is supposedly broader than the others.
As you can see from my examples, the mentality is not restricted to people from a certain region, but seems to exist in the minds of every person. The mentality manifests itself in different aspects of life, including ridiculing the tastes in movies, art etc of people from a certain region (criticisms on south and bollywood movies by different sections of people for example).
It hurts me to read comments of readers on websites and to see the amount of hatred we have towards each other. No wonder then, that time and again, external forces threaten our existence. Diversity is not our weakness, disrespect and ridicule for anything different from what we believe in and like is our weakness. We are now living in a time, where we work with people from different cultures across the world. Then why this tolerance for cultures within the country?
As children, we do not care about the colour, religion or caste of the other child. Only as we grow up, these poisonous seeds are sown inside us. When will we wake up to this reality?
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