Just today morning saw a beautiful quote “Don’t judge my story by the chapter you walked in on”. In Indian society we work less and take the responsibility of character judgment on our shoulders. And we don’t take time in this character assessment. Almost all of us are born with this super power to judge others readily. At times may be by single look. And we take pride in it that we can understand a person very quickly. Step by step of this judging process depends upon the clothes one wear. Amount of skin one exposes. The way one talks. The way one moves or the way one eats. Let us try to understand this by few live examples.
Few days back there was an incident in Noida when group of fringes vandalized a locality. Then it was found out that may be illegal immigrants were behind it. Certain Facebook page posted a video where a lady was showing her ration and voter card. The page captioned the video as “See she pronounced 5 as pans. She must be an illegal immigrant. ” Understanding Bengali culture and belonging to it I hit back at the statement and demanded apology. I said that my grandmother, who settled into India after partition also used to pronounce in same way. I am not really arguing weather the lady in the video was an illegal immigrant or not but you cannot judge anyone by pronunciation. India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Srilanka, Pakistan, Afghanistan has so many things in common. All of them been a part of Indian subcontinent They had similar cultures so based on pronunciation you cannot judge anyone. In Bengal the society is being divided into 1. Those who are originally inhabitant of West Bengal and 2. Those who migrated into West Bengal after partition, the East Bengalians. The East Bengalians and Bangladeshis had mostly similar accent. So, pronunciation is not a valid item to mark nationality of a person.
Next, an image became viral in Facebook, showing a young girl and a woman holding cell phone sitting before a dead body in cemetery. It appeared they were having a selfie with the dead body. The image became viral in social network. People taking their turn to abuse and insult what appeared to be the mother daughter duo, in their own way.
It was later understood that, the young girl created a video chat session for her brother who was not present there, so that he could witness her father for one last time. Just thing about it, how much painful it could have been for the family, who were dealing with a grief to go through another disgusted experience totally unwanted.
Recently, film actress Sunny Leone was trolled mercifully for adopting an abandoned child. What a disgust. People didn’t had issue with a child being abandoned but it’s hurtful for them if someone who had a porn background adopts the baby and provides him a family.
Cricketer Mohammad Kaif was abused for playing chess with his son, and performing yoga in spite of he being a Muslim. Cricketer Irfan Pathan suffered hate speeches for celebrating rakhi and posting his wife’s image in social network which is not allowed in Islam. Mohammed Shami was abused for same reasons.
After Mir Afsar Ali, popular radio jockey, actor and standup comedian, posted an image with his father with caption meaning his father is his Allah he was brutally abused. Singer Sonu Nigam received fatwa from fringes for protesting loud speakers of mosques. Actor Nawazuddin Siddiqui was stopped from playing in Ram Lila.
At one point we are looking to progress. We have reached Mars at the cost of auto fare and at another point we are judgmental fundamentalist abusive and at most time lazy to use our brains. Certainly, we can do better.