It has been a long time since I have written anything, in between I have changed jobs, changed my car, changed my dance classes, did my tax returns for the year, changed a lot of things and in the midst of all that I HAVE BEEN BUSY. There you go now isn’t that a famous stereotypical statement which you hear often. What I mean is that you would always have someone around you mostly at workplace or in your family who would be always telling you – “I have been upto this, I want to do this, I am so capable of doing that… I can go and set up a hydel power plant at Mars… I can devise a homemade recipe for curing cancer. But just that I don’t have the time, I am so busy.” Then you think about it, this guy has a wife perhaps one or two kids a regular house (with mortgage on it obviously) he seems to be the most run of the mill guy with the likes of whom around 50% of this planet is populated. There is nothing unique or special about his lifestyle, yet he is busy. Now time for a confession the reason I have not written anything is because I have had plenty of time but did not find anything interesting to write about. Now that changed over the last couple of months and so I am back at writing.
Over the last 4 years I have consciously trained myself not to be judgmental about people and segregate them into categories at the first glance. The reason for me to consciously do that was that neither I need nor have the right to judge people. I feel very comfortable not needing to have an opinion about everyone in life.
I am not sure about other cultures but we Indians love to be judgmental, an average Indian would perhaps have 10-12 categories in which he can classify the entire population of this planet and I can confidently say the number of categories will not increase even once we discover alien life forms & civilizations.
Let’s try and pen down some of these categories which at least we Indians have:
Fat (if you are an Indian read as healthy) & Thin (if you are an Indian read as malnutrition)
Fit (if you are an Indian read as someone who can just climb the stairs) & Unfit (if you are an Indian & you cannot eat 5 paranthas in a single sitting)
Beautiful (simplest of the lot, if you are a girl & you are fair skinned, if you are a guy then you just need to be loaded with cash) & Ugly (if you are a girl anything other than fair skin, if you are a guy then who is not loaded)
Good Character (you are willing to marry anyone whom your parents decide) & Characterless (you have an opinion about your personal life)
Concerned family person (someone who is there always to enforce his or her wealth of experience - just read as countless years of irrelevant existence on the face of earth consuming precious natural resources, over every single matter in your life, irrespective of whether you require it or not) & Irresponsible loner (someone who does not interfere in every aspect of someone else’s life)
Cultured (who touches the feet of everyone – ‘even during rainy season’ who were born after anything more than 36 seconds of their birth, and whose family does not know about their drinking & smoking habits) & Uncultured synonymous to Vulgar (this has a really interesting segregation, evaluation criteria by girls for girls – if you are not my immediate biological sister, mother or daughter sooner or later I will find a reason to classify you in this bracket, evaluation criteria by guys for girls – if you are not my immediate biological sister, mother, wife or daughter and you refused to sleep with me then sooner or later I will find a reason to classify you in this bracket)
Family (anyone or anything that ever showed up in any of your family functions, your family’s family functions, someone has told you that they are part of family but do not show up at family’s functions, don’t ever bother counting them because it is an infinite set) & not family (anyone who lives on earth and is left out from family & alien civilizations yet to be discovered)
Now those were some of the brackets which I could think of. I will append this list if I come across something else which is prominently used
My next few articles would be around stereotypes which we encounter in different familiar settings in our daily lives. Let’s see how many of them you are able to identify in your lives in similar settings.
Cheers & have a great blogging day ahead.......
No comments:
Post a Comment