TOWARDS A STEREOTYPE-LESS SOCIETY - 1
This is part one of a series of posts that hope to bring to light the stereotypes that exist in the everyday life of an urban family in Chennai. The intention is not to mock society or ridicule people but it is an attempt to move towards a stereotype-less society.
Recently, an elder in the family corrected my seven-year-old son’s usage / pronunciation of a certain word in Tamil. “It isn’t the right way to speak,” she told him. To her, the ‘right’ way meant the Brahminical way of speaking. What my son had uttered was a phrase that was not part of the Brahmin lexicon. It was the way his non-Brahmin friends spoke.
I politely, yet firmly, told her that I did not believing in 'fixing' the way my son spoke, just because it didn’t sound ‘nice’ to her generation of puritans.
If language is a medium of communication, then how does it matter how it is spoken? What’s in a language? Who decides what is ‘right’ for whom and what sounds ‘good’? Why should anyone speak only in a certain clannish way and not in any other way? Why is there a need to ‘protect’ one’s practices from external influences?
Lest I am accused of Brahmin-bashing, let me place on record that it is not just the Brahmins. Everywhere around the world, people try to preserve their accents, while deriding other dialects. And the Tamil Brahmin manner of speaking has also been subject to a fair share of derision and scrutiny.
Instead of celebrating the diversity of dialects, accents and ways of speaking, we as a generation are guilty of having needless hang-ups that smack of ignorance and insecurity. Little do we realise that we are shamelessly perpetuating stereotypical thinking among young minds. By correcting the manner in which a child speaks, we may be drawing invisible lines and codes of conduct that make very little sense in today’s day and age. Our minds for long have been conditioned to think in a certain manner that ‘unconditioning’ it is not so easy. But it has to be done.
Lest I am accused of Brahmin-bashing, let me place on record that it is not just the Brahmins. Everywhere around the world, people try to preserve their accents, while deriding other dialects. And the Tamil Brahmin manner of speaking has also been subject to a fair share of derision and scrutiny.
Instead of celebrating the diversity of dialects, accents and ways of speaking, we as a generation are guilty of having needless hang-ups that smack of ignorance and insecurity. Little do we realise that we are shamelessly perpetuating stereotypical thinking among young minds. By correcting the manner in which a child speaks, we may be drawing invisible lines and codes of conduct that make very little sense in today’s day and age. Our minds for long have been conditioned to think in a certain manner that ‘unconditioning’ it is not so easy. But it has to be done.
As I bring up my two boys, I am fighting a constant, conscious and vigilant battle to ensure the influence on them with respect to stereotypes is minimal, if not zilch.
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Also read: http://www.newindianexpress.com/cities/chennai/Its-Time-to-Do-Away-With-Tam-Brahm/2016/03/17/article3330450.ece
2 comments:
Can't agree more Shwetha...
You and I will agree. What about those who don't? There lies the issue.
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