No one is new to racism in this world. Many must have experienced the ugly treatment, and it would not be politically correct for anyone to take sides with the racist. But the truth is that in India, we are fed daily doses of racism in the form of fairness cream ads on the TV. Going by an ad, a girl has to be fair to be playing tennis; how fair is that. If there are people raising ridiculous voices for calling a barber a barber, why has not anyone done so against money-making products exploiting the same gullible people.
But that's not all there is to it. I call it racism for the absence of a more appropriate word, but it's nothing more than discrimination. Discrimination between two persons, two objects, two anything, when there's nothing really fundamental that rates one above the other. The two things are different, that's it. He is white, i am not. He grows a beard, i do not. How and why does one compare the two? And it's not just human beings that such things apply to. The number one victim of such a discrimination is i would say the night. All poets across all countries have likened the day to hope and good, while the night is sad and evil. (One could, but i would rather not, steer towards classifying things as good and bad, but instead would use the prevailing simple ideas.) Even amongst the nights, a new moon is supposed to be inauspicious, but a full moon is beautiful. Now you can see, where the bias in favour of the white skin comes from. Severely skewed sex ratio in several parts of our country is a testimony to the 'racism' being applied to not only colour of the skin but also to gender of the children. But is it obviously not fair. All the people, the day, the night, moonless or otherwise are created by the same entity, let's call it nature rather than God, then how could it be that one is better than the other. If one were really better than the other, won't nature be blamed of elitism, and then that would be a very hard thing to digest.
Again that's not all there is to it, and this one affects our lives more closely. Say, someone likes apples, and someone else oranges. Even in such mundane matters, some people tend to become very opinionated, and then the person loving apples would say with a lot conviction that he does not like oranges at all. It's then funny yet sad to see the orange-lover get offended, and go on narrating the benefits of his favourite fruit. Why not let the other person love his apples peacefully, and go buy oranges for oneself. And where also is the need to deny people from liking their oranges? One could look around and see such stuff going on everywhere. Things grow to unruly levels, and with disturbing frequency, if one replaces the fruit one likes with the god one worships or the language one speaks or the clothes one wears or the music one listens to. It's not like i have an answer for all of the world's problems, but even on a much smaller scale, where your interaction is limited to a relatively smaller number of people, taking such things at face value would contribute towards reducing a bit of friction in our lives.
You can observe some commonalities across all the things in which such racism is prevalent. The fairer and bigger is in most of the cases supposed to be better than the darker and smaller. Maybe it's wired into our brains, because what makes the first impression on an interviewer's mind is the colour of the candidate's skin, so i was told before our campus placements. I think it's a notion that has carried itself -- and spilt over in other areas -- from the olden times. It was unwise then, and hence bad, to venture out after dark; when you couldn't take your survival for granted, you obviously had to be stronger than the others. Such things were on a very local level, and they changed drastically once you crossed an ocean or two. For in that foreign land survival might have required you to be on the shorter side. When the world was connected several centuries ago, when peoples came face to face with each other, they failed to shed those notions from their minds, and it gave rise to a feeling of superiority (and inferiority). But we humans as conscious beings, i believe, can certainly overcome the wired emotion. For example, they say, the basic aim of all the species is to increase its number. If again we were to follow that instict, the world would be a worse place (than it already is) to live in.
