from cycling to other races
Everybody's a racist. O.K. Maybe racist is a strong word. Race-conscious is more appropriate. Its an inherent character trait of being human. I'm not going to shy away from it anymore. In India its more about caste/religion/language consciousness. But those are merely sub-sects of race-consciousness. Hey! maybe i should start an international cult called RACECON, like the much-maligned ISKCON(for the uninitiated - International Society for Krishna Consciousness..the hare-krsna guys). I think I'm on to something here.I grew up in a well-protected environment in Chembur, a quiet suburb of Bombay. My closest friends were 2 maharashtrian kids. I'm a south-indian. our immediate circle of friends had two Himachalis, one Christian, one Mangalori, one Gujarati, and a few Tamil kids(yeah, it was a south-indian dominated suburb). Me and my 2 maharashtrian buddies practically spent all our childhood in each other's homes. It didn't matter that our fore-fathers were from different parts of India. Yeah, we spoke different languages with our folks. But that was just some household thing. Different people speak different languages. Thats was just that.
I was told that a Haryanvi Jat is all brawn and no brains. 'Never do business with a Punjabi, and most certainly, not with a Sindhi', they said.'They'll con you'. That Biharis are slime-bags. And Parsis are crazy. That Malyalis were horny. And Gujaratis lacked taste. And Bengalis would kill for fish and communism. That Tamilians are number-crunching geeks. That women from the north-east were easy to bed. It didnt matter if they were from Manipur, Meghalaya, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim, Nagaland, Tripura or Mizoram. 'Its all the same', they said.
All untrue.
But my race-consciousness was awakened.
Then i went to the U.S. Now, my race-education was getting truly global. I was an East-Indian. There were the Native-Indians( we always knew of them as red-indians in India. I was disappointed i didn't see any tepees, though). I could successfully tell an Irish-American from an Italian-American. Then, there were hispanics and African-American. I could tell Jews from Baptists. And seventh-day-adventist. And Evangelists.
All these factions just within America. It would take me a lifetime to talk about my education about the Greeks and Sicilians. And the Koreans and Taiwanese. And the Arabs. And the Japanese. And the Germans. And the French. Oh my god!
I got back to India, and i see more people of international-origin than I've ever seen here. So now we have the Dutch, Brazilians, Poles, the French and Americans, right here in Bombay. And we know one from the other. And they know one from the other.
So what's the deal with race. We created the nomenclature. We identify them. We like some more than the others.
What's stopping you from joining RACECON.
Join now for special early-bird incentives*
*conditions apply
posted by chandru @ 2:28 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home