TOI makes me think again

Yesterday evening, while flipping through the pages of newspaper after a long tiring day.... On the editorial page of the newspaper i read 3 words in dark bold fonts

"India Is Racist"....

This caught my eyes and i could not resist the temptation of reading the article.

Reading the first few lines, i understood that the idea of racism / discrimination that the author had was very different and in disagreement with what i believe in. Hence I have to write this one.

One point that i think i strongly disagree to was when the author said that we are racist because "We treat the Foreigners differently in India, we have different rules for them "... From what i could gather from the read was that the author wants to convey that there still is some sort of inferiority complex that we are having in our mind as a community.

I think i completely disagree with this.

• Firstly, If we treat foreigners specially, that is what our culture has taught us, "Atithi Devo Bhav", any one who is a guest has to be treated very specially. I dont think it is because we feel they are better but it is so because they have come to our land and we feel indebted to our country to an extent that we make our visitors feel good about it. There is nothing wrong in it.

• Secondly, I agree partially to the fact that there is a section of our society that still gets awed by the "gori chamdi" but there also is a section of society which hates it. Hypocricy is everywhere, people who get awed might even copy them even when it does not suit their way of living and people who hate it might actually tell it on the basis of the "Tradition"; "different tradition" doesnot necessarily mean a bad one. I think that comes from the hypocritic nature that we all have in less or in more and we have to start understanding it.
  
• Thirdly, though i think that we are not racist, i belive we discriminate on one or the other basis, just put your hand on your heart and say that background of a person does not matter to you when you deal with him. I am sure some way or the other we discriminate people based on their intelligence, looks, religion, smartness, likeability, similarity of opinions etc etc.... WE DISCRIMINATE but that is human, and we should not be ashamed of being human.

But we need to lessen this, as that is what i believe philosophers call MOKSH, a state of life where you dont discriminate, there is no good there is no bad , no rich no poor.......

CRUX OF THE MATTER : India is not a racist country but we do discriminate based on a 1000 different things