A Divided World

In the last 2 weeks we have seen a lot of unrest in America due to the murder of a black person called 'George Floyd' by the police. Violent protests have broken down in various parts of America condemning Trump and his racist staments in the aftermath of George's untimely death. People from all walks of life have come to the realization that America is an extremely racist country, something they always knew. Businesses have expressed solidarity with the #BlackLivesMatter movement and have decided to shun anyone trying to snatch away black rights. Something the documentary 13th had shown long back and businesses decided to sit tight lipped since it was serving their interests. Why would any business jeopardize its optics by being part of a movement started by individuals who at best could be described as vigilantes or enemy of the state as Vince Flynn or Kyle Mills would describe it? But this blog isn't about America's growing unrest over racial discrimination. This is about a lot of things I have seen and felt over my 4 decade long lifespan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krfcq5pF8u8

Right after the George Floyd debacle happened, people from all parts of the world started expressing solidarity and India was no exception. Our very own celebrities from tinsel town started inundating twitter with the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag and expressing their sympathies to black people based out of America. People in India started blaming America for being a racist country with white supremacists. A lot of intellectual community blamed Trump for being a bigot and promoting violence in a country which has been the beacon of hope for the last 2 millenia for the homosapien populace or maybe was a beacon of hope till the recession of 2008 when it lost its shine and leaders globally felt no obligation to follow everything Uncle Sam does.Fareed Zakaria describes it best in his cult book 'The Post American World'. Newsroom captured it picture perfectly but didn't get the TRP it needed. We can't blame Jeff Daniels for that, in the aftermath of his brilliant monologue on 'Why America is not the greatest country in the world?'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTjMqda19wk

Coming back to India, we started with our usual business of criticism that we are exceedingly good at. We talked about how great our culture is that respects so many diverse set of communities. I heard it even from my family who were happy I had left SF to come back to India , just in time before the Fourth Reich started. As I was talking to folks I know and hearing all this commotion that was triggered by the George Floyd episode, my mind was trying to rationalize all what I had seen over the years.

Let me talk a bit about all that. I grew up in a small city called Lucknow, which is the capital of Uttar Pradesh(the state with the largest population in India). Not many know but UP has as much people as Brazil. In my growing up days, we were asked to keep a distance from the workers who'd work in our households. The reasons given were as lame as them being dirty and unhygienic and the chances they could pass on some contagious disease. My innocuos mind still made me mingle with them inspite of those so called warnings. I'd play with kids of labourers and would happily share chocolates and candies with them. There were separate utensils for people who worked in my house. We were asked not to use them because of the aforementioned reasons. I didn't think too much on these lines as I was growing up because the discrimination was passive. Most of the people who worked in my household were exceedingly kind to me. I liked being around them and talking to them.

Even in school, some of my friends came from lower middle class families whose families found it difficult to make their ends meet. I'd often see them wearing a torn shirt or a dilapidated blazer and they'd be picked up from a queue and punished because of their untidy attire or their unkempt hair. Not many realised they came from a background where it wasn't easy for them to afford education, in an expensive school like that. At a student level I wasn't privy to a lot of incidents involving discrimination save a few teachers who were biased and had their own favourites.Most of these students were the entitled lot with rich dads who had deep pockets. They wouldn't mind doling out favours to these teachers as long as their kids received royal treatment. I believe that was the scene everywhere back then. I saw discrimination quite closely when I was thrown out of the football team in Class Xth inspite of being the best player around to fit in a rich kid who had no clue why he was made the 'Centre forward'. So discrimination based on economic status was quite prevalent and something I experienced far and wide many a times.

As I became more and more aware of things in my growing years, I discovered that there was all kinds of discrimination, something I was oblivious to. In my undergrads I witnessed different levels of discrimination. I saw discrimination based on caste. One would often see Thakurs and Pandits fighting it off. I'd witness religious discrimination where people from different communities would find fault with each other. It would lead to a lot of chaos. I'd see upper caste Hindus waging crusades on dalits. It seemed like a war cry every now and then. As I graduated and went to Pune for my first job , I'd witness region specific divide. It was like a mini battle ground inside a company. Marathis would talk to only Marathis. Gujaratis had their own group, Tamils lived only in their peer groups except for group meetings and code reviews and almost everyone was part of some region specific group. I was an exception. I spoke to everyone and I was deeply encouraged to be part of some group. The perks were irresistible but the motivation was zero. I decided to be the solitary reaper in this divided ecosystem.

As I traveled outside for work and lived a few years in Europe and America, it dawned on me that, discrimination was present even in the first world. I remember going to a supermarket in Yorkshire, London, where the accountant wouldn't bill me and on constant insistence asked me to step out. I was literally thrown out because of the colour of my skin. I was once party to a couple of French guys making fun of me and my friend at the Louvre museum in Paris, on a chilly December morning. The term they used to describe us was 'brown bags'. I didn't mind at all but my friend got overly furious. Even in America, the land of milk and honey, plush with opportunities and the capital of modern day capitalism, I had my brush with discrimination, from subtle to unbelievably surreal. NYC, SF, Boston, Dallas, NJ and all the major places where I lived had this passive form of discriminatory behaviour. It wasn't quite like the advent of the Ku Klux Klan but it did lurk out in behavioural patterns of people much too often. White people perhaps view black, brown, latino and Asian people as third world products but I can't say that for every white person I met. I have met some of the kindest white crowd in America too. These guys went out of their normal lives to help me out when I was stranded on many occasions. I am still friends with a lot of them.

Now that I've talked about all forms of discrimination that I have witnessed, let me expand on it further. It would be moral suicide to discuss about discrimination and not talk about the real reason why discrimination exists. I believe discrimination is a by product of the agricultural revolution. It divided the human population into ethnicities, religions, regions, castes, creeds, economic status, to enforce effective control. The idea, the first(Church) and the second estate(King) had, was always to have absolute power. Most of the these imagined realities like religion or corporations were created to divide people for effective governance. Such social distinctions ensured various ethnographic or anthropological groups,clash with each other and the King or Feudal Lord would benefit from this chaos. In fact we have an algorithm in Computer Science called 'Divide and Conquer' that tends to divide a problem into various small parts and then attacks them individually. If you look at the last 10000 years of homosapien revolution, you'd find the algo has been used quite effectively to rein in.

I don't think we have ever looked past each other without a trace of prejudice. I see it precipitating in conversations. Everything reeks of this mad race to be a superior breed. It has cost us compassion and empathy. It has decmiated human civilizations and resulted in genocides. Never have we put aside our differences and accepted each other as merely humans capable of making mistakes. Anti racism pioneer Jane Eliott describes the entire notion of racial prejudice as illogical. Her T-Shirt reads 'prejudice is an emotional commitment to ignorance'. It's a powerful statement. It brings to light the fact that every cultural group has had their own history and to merely dismiss it as gibberish and denigrate it to prmomote one's own culture is nothing short of ignorance, something the Western world has been doing in bits and parts for a little over 500 years. Churchill often made disparaging comments about Indians, particularly in private conversation. At one point he explicitly told his Secretary of State for India, Leo Amery that he "hated Indians" and considered them "a beastly people with a beastly religion". It's Churchill's arrogance and hate toward the Indian civilization that resulted in the deaths of 3 million people in the Bengal famine of 1943. If that's not reason enough to convince you of the catastrophic effects of divide then nothing ever will. Take a look at this video of Jane Eliott to see her POV on racial discrimination

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFQkLp5u-No

What's equally obnoxious is that our cognitive dissonance has made us objects of apathy and inaction. Our ideological belief system is so deeply entrenched in our psyche that our value system calibrates it to be far more important than objective realities. Yuval Harari mentions the same in 'Sapiens' , when he cites that in the modern world 'imagined realities like country, corporation, religion have become far more important than objective realities like a human being in flesh and blood. Although the worst is behind us, if Steven Pinker is to be believed, we still have a long way to go to bring about equality. Do you have the faintest idea why different ideological groups clash? Call it natural selection or survival of the fittest but we are built to bring forth chaos. Why do you think we need chaos? Because it creates the perfect conditions for state of the art creationism. Ever heard of Big Bang and how the universe was formed right after that. At an evolutionary scale natural selection might be the right way to ensure species propogate successfully but at a humane level, the so called divide could result in mass extinctions of epic proportions. We could lose the planet forever. A simple cost benefit analysis would show us the impending effects of this divide that is bound to suck every ounce of growth we have witnessed. Its a point of fracture that needs to be acknowledged and fixed before its too late.

The onus to save the planet, lies completely with us. We can decide to spread this bigotry and wage wars and carry forth genocides or we can be a little tolerant and eliminate our ignorance toward people from other cultures. It breaks my heart to see innocent children and women being at the receiving end of hatred caused due to racial divide. It makes me sad when politicians use this divide to push their agenda. It petrifies me when George Floyd is killed in America. It makes me feel so helpless when a 3 year old girl in Kashmir is raped and mutilated in India in the name of religion. I will not have this anymore. I will swear my allegiance to humanity- the only religion or belief system that I hold in utmost respect. I will not let this evil consume us any futher than it already has. I hope we can all try to be a little human for a change. I hope we can learn to love each other like humans should. Didn't Andy Dufresne say.

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