Discrimination

Discrimination is in our minds!

by Chinam Kali Prasad

A quirk of mind or is it in the genetic make-up of every human being to discriminate? A child is born with a clean slate or so shall we assume…discounting the re-birth and after-life postulations. As the child grows, the mother has the onerous responsibility of nurturing him/her… much more than the rest of the family members… and later, the various teachers, who enlighten the curious mind of the little one.

The first factor that is taught to the child is his/her name which becomes his identity…! But, do we really stop there? The parents, the siblings, the peers, the elders, the teachers all indoctrinate the child and add a number of details to his/her identity. As the child learns to read and write, he/she imbibes increasing knowledge of his surroundings, their past and the likely future. He/she gets exposed to various media and imbibes a little more of the culture of his/her people as well as their past, present and future.

By the time a child reaches the age of teens, his/her identity has grown to make him/her aware of the race, the religion, the caste, the surname, the economic status, the standing in society, the language to be spoken and the standing in the peer groups. The indoctrination is complete and the identity decides the future of this child. The teenager, of course, has questions…the world was one…it was called the Pangea…which means that the entire stock of the world’s population of human beings arose from the same source…so why should he/she be any different from the others? Why are people designated as Caucasian or Negroid or Mongoloid…is it just for their looks? Isn’t that the functioning of every human being’s body the same…we all breathe…we all need food to survive and grow, we all need to develop? And who decided as to which person will follow which religion, which person will be baptized into which caste, which person will be in which society???

The teenager, by the time he/she becomes an adult, would have found answers to most of these questions, but some will always be left unanswered. And the persons, on whom he/she depends upon for the answers, will put it off by saying that it is our culture or that it is part of our traditions, so do not ask more! While superstitions have been decoded and explained away in a scientific manner, the discrimination that we face every day is more or less given to our mental states!

The question that begs an answer is ‘Will every human being in this world of ours ever remove these barriers, physical and mental?’

And the next time, if a child asks you as to why we hurt each other or kill each other, what will be your answer?