Prejudice

My name is Prejudice.

I hear a start. Why are you so surprised? If celebrities can name their children all weird names, why can’t my parents? You see, someone once told my parents, ‘Prejudice is the root cause of all the problems in the world’. So because of my earlier mentioned sweet nature, in my childhood, I never gave my parents the chance to get an impression that I am the cause of any problem. I ensured that they knew I was the problem. The cause, the effect and the whole nine yards in between. Hence Prejudice.

I can hear a question coming. What do I look like? Well, therein lies my secret, my dear friend. I was born with the trick of being so obvious that I am invisible. I mean, I do not hide behind things, or assume others’ shapes. I always ensure that I am in plain, clear view of everyone, wherever I am. Yet so few people see me as I am.

What I do is to play games. What I do is to be at many places at the same time. What does that mean? That means that I have the ability to be one moment with the observed, the next with the observer. Often, when person A is looking at B, I stay with B and when person B is looking at A, I stay with A. This results in both A and B believing that they are free of Prejudice but the other one is plagued with Prejudice.

A game that I play is to get my friends along and play tricks on people. Most common is my friend Division. Now Division is a very smart guy. He is helpless without me, of course. Here’s what we do. We chose a group of people. Then division divides them into two groups on some random basis – religion, skin-colour, language, country, caste, race, wealth, education - there are so many things. Then I go to one group, take up the form of “Prejudice against the other groups” and mingle with the group so much that I become a part of their identity. Then I repeat the same things with other groups. Then both Division and Prejudice sit back and enjoy the fireworks between these groups. It’s real fun. The best part is that the effect is so long-lasting. One time effort, long time fun.

Our favourite is when we use religion as the basis of our play. It’s ironic because neither I, Prejudice nor Division have a single religious bone in our body. All the Religions call us their enemies, but the followers of most of them are so susceptible to our pranks. We love it. It is so easy for me to take the form of “That religion was created just to oppose others” or “That religion is so violent” or “That religion is backward and promotes immoral things” or “That religion has been persecuting us throughout the history” or “That religion is the majority, so will suppress us”. My personal favourite form is “We are the most tolerant religion, other religions are not tolerant and will fight against us; so we must fight back”. Height of oxymoron-ism, isn’t it? You won’t believe how less evidence I have to use to take these forms. People are so ready to believe these that, at times, I feel they need me and that they cannot live without harbouring Prejudice in one form or another in their minds. All those poor Religions have been working for ages to better humanity and we use that identity itself to destroy it all. Don’t you love it?

The other day, another friend of mine, Jealousy, asked me to help her play a prank on a young dusky beauty and her boyfriend. What we did was, first I went to the girl in the form of “Men only like fair-skinned girls”. Next, Jealousy guided a fair-skinned girl to collide with this girl’s boyfriend. You should have seen the scene. The poor guy didn’t know what hit him. First this fair-skinned girl collides with him, then slaps him saying, “You idiot! Don’t you have any shame? You see a fair-skinned girl and you start misbehaving”; then the girlfriend slapped him saying, “You don’t like me because I am dark” and then the girl started crying. Poor guy got slapped for no fault of his and on top of that, had to apologize profusely.

Now, while you are reading this, don’t be fooled into thinking that you are not influenced by me. My influence knows no bounds, no boundaries. I affect men and women alike, Orientals and Occidentals alike, educated and uneducated alike, rich and poor alike. Everyone is equal in my eyes. Well, not exactly equal. I have to admit that I have to use different forms and different techniques to influence different people. One thing I have to be careful about is not to be prejudiced myself. So I cannot assume that all men would be influenced by my “Women can’t read maps” form; neither can I assume that all women would be influenced by my “Men can’t ask for directions” form. I treat everyone equally in that I have to analyse what form of prejudice a person be influenced with. There’s always one form or the other that works.

Let me tell you a bit about what I stand for. My name literally is pre judice or prior judgement. This means that I influence people to judge other people a priori i.e. without knowing enough facts about that individual. Or in other words, prejudice is judging an individual based on the group he/she belongs to. In areas where casteism prevails, for example, I influence Brahmins to pre-judge a man to be dirty and unhygienic if his caste is Shudra. Post 9/11, I influenced a lot of Americans to pre-judge anyone wearing a turban to be an Arab and to pre-judge any man to be a terrorist if he was an Arab. Nepotism prevails because I influence people to pre-judge individuals based on whether they belong to their extended family or not. Xenophobia prevails because I influence people to pre-judge foreigners to be untrustworthy. In bourgeois societies, I influence people to assume that people belonging to the lower class do not know how to behave, have no manners and no taste of things to appreciate, so we can’t mix with them. And so on. The most interesting thing is that my actions are not one way. I influence the rich to judge all poor people as uncivilised at the same time that I influence the poor to judge all rich people as exploiters.

Let me also tell you that I am not all bad. In fact, the whole idea of everything being able to be classified in good and bad is a prejudice in itself, isn’t it? Though normally my name is used in the form “prejudiced against”, let me tell you I am not all negative. Like the prejudice about blondes. While people pre-judge a blonde to be dumb, they also pre-judge a blonde to be sexy and desirable. While people pre-judge others on the basis of their clothes and communication skills, they are quite often making a positive judgement, pre-judging a person to be good just because he is well-dressed or can talk smoothly. There are a lot of positive judgements happening on the basis of a person fitting a certain stereotype, without evaluating all the aspects of that person. Prejudice is all about classifying people into stereotypes, and humans can’t live without classification, for sure. Think about it, thank the stereotypes; evaluation of a person takes a lifetime. If stereotypes were not there, all our life would just be spent evaluating each other, rather than getting anything productive done.

Let me tell you about my India experience. India is a very interesting. The country is no better or worse than others from a Prejudice perspective, in the sense that any Indian is as likely to be prejudiced as any other country’s citizen. The interesting thing here is - there is such a myriad of cultural interplay here, such a beautiful variety of social stimuli that the number of things to be prejudiced about is infinite. India is my biggest success and biggest failure. Biggest success because I have instilled in almost every individual a deep prejudice against multiple things. Biggest failure because when an exam looks too easy and you don’t score cent percent, you feel failure. And when you realise that all your correct answers, your wins are changing their shapes, you feel even bigger failure.

That’s India for you. Every individual here harbours so many prejudices. Prejudice against people of lower caste/ upper caste/ their own caste; prejudice against people of other religion/ own religion; prejudice against people with higher/lower literacy; prejudice against people who succeed/ fail; prejudice against people from other states/ own state; prejudice against people who speak other language/ own language, prejudice for/ against the richness of Indian culture; prejudice for/ against rituals and traditions; prejudice against people of younger/ older/ own generation; prejudice for/ against love/ arranged marriage; blah, blah, blah. There is hardly a chance to form a fresh evaluation of a situation/ person. Almost everything is pre-judged based on so many stereotypes.

My initial game-plan was to create impressions in people’s minds against “people not like us”. In India, I realised this “us” changes for every individual almost every instant. There is this guy, whose religion in Hindu, was born in Bihar, brought up in Delhi, is an engineer and MBA and is employed as a project manager in Bangalore. So many labels that this man wears. He is prejudiced against Muslims when he is with his religious community. In office however, his prime prejudice is against the non-MBA engineers who do not know how to manage projects and yet have the nerve to compete against him. Muslim MBA engineers are his allies then. He is prejudiced against English speaking south-Indians when he is with his Delhi friends, but when he is at a client location, he is prejudiced against these northy-freshers who come straight out of college speaking Hindi and don’t know how to speak to a customer. He has to fight the prejudice against Biharis everyday, but himself looks down upon Biharis who have stayed in Bihar as lazy idiots.

Now here’s the interesting thing. This guy makes some wrong decisions because of his prejudices, selecting the wrong people in his team, supporting the wrong kind of organisations in personal life, having unnecessary complexes about his self and so on. But overall, he is a good person, a good social being and a good project manager. This is where I fail. Inspite of lots of individual screw-ups, the overall individual in India is still a functioning individual. In spite of having created so many differences and divisions, they still seem to co-exist reasonably well. Its baffling, to say the least.

Look at Mumbai. The city houses Juhu/Ville Parle, the most upmarket of suburbs anywhere in the world just adjacent to Dharavi, world’s largest slum. Don’t think for a moment that these two classes don’t hate each other, they do. The “haves” always curse the “have-nots” for blotting their landscape; the “have-nots” always curse the “haves” for spending money on frivolous things rather then uplifting the society. But they co-exist. People from Juhu buy leather goods made in Dharavi and people from Dharavi are the taxi drivers in whose taxis the Juhu-ites roam about. The biggest political party in the city is a Hindu party, and does cause a lot of religious tension in the city, but the city business is run by a lot of Muslims/ Parsis and the business goes on smoothly. There is a deep anti-non-Maratha sentiment prevalent among Marathis and the issue of driving all non-Marathas out of Mumbai is never completely closed, yet half the population of the city is from other states, does not understand Marathi, has adopted the city as their only home, are the backbone of the city’s functioning and so very well-mingled with all the Marathis around that’s its impossible to distinguish. Inspite of all this, the city still functions well, in the financial capital of India and is proudly taking India through its tremendous growth.

Look at Bangalore. The new-age city. Supposedly the educated people. There is a deep north-south divide. Forget North-South, there is a significant Kannada-Tamil divide. There is a big divide on the lines of language – why can’t these southies just accept Hindi as the national language vs. why do these northies want to force Hindi down our throats. There is a divide between IT workers and non-IT workers on the lines of haves-have-nots divide. There is a divide between people who have stayed in western countries and. people who have been in India all their lives. Inspite of all this, the city still functions well, in the new-age growth capital, the IT centre of India and is proudly taking India through its tremendous growth.

If you don’t know India, you won’t believe this. These people are always ready to pick up some excuse or other to fight with each other. If nothing else, they will fight on “Is Sachin Tendulkar better or Sourav Ganguly?” or “Is Kishore Kumar a better singer or Mohd. Rafi?” or “Is Shahrukh Khan a better actor or Aamir Khan?” These are not mere discussion topics; these are lines on which the country is divided.

I have come to conclude some things. The reason for my enormous success in India is due to variety inherent in the local culture. That is the reason I have been able to create so much negativity. And that precisely is my reason for failure - my failure to lead these people from negativity to destruction. The reason is the inherent variety. Everyone here expects the other person to be different. Everyone here expects to compromise his prejudices for work to get done. And that has inculcated an overall tolerance which enables these people to continue and to prosper. There are days when I am able to attack that tolerance, I am able to convince these people to put their common-sense aside and go with their prejudices. Days like Dec6. Days like Jul11. But these days are few and far in between. When I am able to remove that tolerance on a permanent basis; that will be the end of this country. Wish me luck!