Allow me to say something-Nutmeg. Didn’t make sense, did it? Exactly. Neither do stereotypes.
Being a fair skinned, Hindi speaking South Indian, I have often found myself at the receiving end of multiple questions. “How can you possibly speak Hindi?”, “Are you native to some other place but reside there?” and the likes of them.
The true reason this happens is because we normalise such behaviour. Lie to me if you have to, but if you’re reading this and you’re not from the southern parts of India, you’ll be lying to yourself if you haven’t ever even once imagined that all South Indians only eat rice. Given the absence of a natural drive to verify facts, most people often end up believing in whatever nonsense they are fed. Alright, I can live with you chaps imagining the entire South Indian region is actually one mega-state, but this attitude points towards a much larger problem.
Several persistent evils in society exist solely because of this kind of normalisation. A simple example would be that several girls, irrespective of their colleges, and even in the prestigious IITs are subject to great pressure from their families to be ‘decent and dignified’, euphemistically of course. For you to deny this, yet again, lie to me, but don’t lie to yourself. The only visible logic here is the fact that she’s female. It barely matters she is at either the same or a higher intellectual level as compared to her male counterparts, she must be expected to comply with all the rules that the rest of Indian girls are coerced to. And why so? Because her parents force her to. Her elders force her to. Sadly, even her friends do. In the tiniest ways. Seeing the earlier in time as a necessary measure for ‘safety’. Allowing for discriminative laws based solely on sex, which creates an unnatural superiority for males. And remember, this is just an example.
There are several other issues at hand. A weird obsession with fairness came in partly because of a subconscious bias, and partly because cosmetic companies have fed us the idea so well, we actually believe in it. Admit it, we all cringe a little on the inside when a person or we ourselves are not as fair as we ‘need’ to be. ‘Casual’ sexism is also visible in the same adverts when men with darker complexion are always portrayed as working hard in the sun, while women are almost always shown to suddenly achieve high echelons with the onset of fairer skin. Wait, scratch that. ONLY with the onset of fairer skin.
The truth is, there is no natural order. We, the humans created and nurtured society, forming its unspoken laws over time, which are now considered gospel truth. What’s truly embarrassing is that even though we gave our species the name homo sapiens, literally ‘wise man’, most of these antitheses of logic are easily accommodated, masked under the name of ‘personal beliefs’.
We too, contribute in our own small ways. Every time you look at a Marwari and wonder what business he must be handling, you’re forcing an entire community to stay within a periphery. When you casually remark to your female friends that their degrees don’t matter as much because ‘some guy is slogging it out for her’, you’re hurting a female entrepreneur’s chances of getting funding for her next venture. When you equate a career in sports with disaster, you’re stripping a person of his dreams and a nation of its laurels, because unfortunately, we, the people collectively are the ones who decide what’s normal and what’s not, so please stop nodding with half-baked arguments based on ill-founded sentiment, and use your faculties for common sense.
Devil's Advocacy 