A curious line jumped out of the Pew Research Center ‘Religion in India: Tolerance and Segregation’ survey that, since its release last month, has had proper, serious columnists picking on it like gynaecologists gathering around an immaculate conception. ‘Indians generally stick to their own religious group when it comes to their friends.’The moment I read the line, I was appalled. About myself. It was like taking a look in the mirror and seeing Pragya Thakur smile back. By no means am I someone who believes that if a chap is thought to be carrying a leg of beef, he only incidentally happens to be a Muslim who has been beaten up. I also don’t think that inter-religious marriages need to be prevented, like 80% of India’s Muslims do, who, according to Pew, think it’s ‘very important to stop Muslim women from marrying outside their religion’. I know I’m the entitled one, who doesn’t care who marries whom — although it is a fact that I did not want ‘anyone else’ to marry the (Christian) pop star Samantha Fox, until I realised (after my own marriage) she was gay. But Pew made me confront a reality: not so much that all my close friends are Hindu, but the other (suppressed?) fact that an overwhelming number of my close friends are Bengali. Am I a Bengali supremacist?!In a room full of people, do I gravitate towards Bengalis? No, not unless there happens to be a friend who happens to be Bengali. Do I chat more passionately with a Hindu Rabindrasangeet-lover or a Sikh Rolling Stones fan? Certainly, the latter. And nothing makes me run faster than a Bengali who pronounces the word ‘indubitably’ and then looks around the room to see whether people are impressed that he has pronounced the word ‘indubitably’ the way Messrs Wren & Martin wanted the children of British officers in India to pronounce it.Things would probably have been different if I lived in Boston, or spent some time in a multi-culti campus. But who knows? Even the liberal Barack Obama didn’t marry a blonde.I’m married to a Bengali, 81% of my friends are Bengali (4% of the remaining 19% are from Kolkata, so they’re as Bengali as this year’s junior Wimbledon Samir Banerjee is American), my ‘home food’ is Bengali…. If Pew did survey me, surely, they would expose me as a man who ‘sticks to my language group when it comes to his friends’. In other words, a ghetto boy.But then, a man is not only known by the company he keeps, but also by the company he keeps at a social distance. For me, this includes Bengalis. The Pew survey states that many Hindus (45%) say they are ‘fine with having neighbours of all other religions’. Here, I’m more like 54% of Jains (and 36% of Hindus), who ‘would not accept a Muslim neighbour’ — except in my case, I’d rather not have a Bengali neighbour (which I don’t).Much of my reason for existing in this island of anti-Bengalism in a sea of pro-Bengalism is because I take my private space seriously. This is impossible if I were a Bengali living next to a Bengali, or find myself travelling with one — unless I keep badmouthing Amartya Sen and Syama Prasad Mukherjee with the same gusto. The same reasons that make me hold on to my Bengali friends —knowing them for decades, finding many of these old friends ‘coincidentally’ also having migrated to Delhi, love for Hindi movies, finding self-loathers suspicious, etc —probably makes me avoid generic Bengalis. So then, in the language of social scientists, am I a ‘melting pot,’ a ‘patchwork,’ or a ‘salad bowl’ of a social animal? I think Pew would find me 64% ‘fruitcake’ and 22% ‘khichdi’, and the remaining 14% just someone who loves chilli chicken (with bone) dry, regardless of which community kitchen or religious restaurant makes it well. My hatred for gobi — 100% no mixing with my food, no matter if someone lets a hundred cauliflowers bloom — hardly makes me a bigot.
from Economic Times https://ift.tt/3z5sJZh
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