The state of conflict

I am Indian. I am South Indian. I am from Kerala. I am from the North of Kerala, Cochin to be more precise. I am Nair. I am a Pillai. My mom is a Menon though.
I was born in Bahrain, spent three years of primary schooling in Mumbai and then the rest of my life in Sharjah and Dubai till I came down to Rajasthan, Pilani to be more precise.

Did you or I forget what I said the first..oh yeah, I am Indian. Thank you for reminding me. (Jeez what a clichéd modus operandi but nevertheless)
That’s what we are today. We are a highly biased set of people who associate the strongest, with the minutest segregation of individuality than the rope that binds us all.
When Shashi Tharoor was a UN general, we felt proud to be represented as an Indian. When he is a member of the parliament in our country, he somehow seems less significant and people of Kerala find it easier to associate to him ( not really owing to his knack of attracting the wrong publicity,so lets say the Tweeters. Lol )

Who am I then? Where do I belong. I can’t speak my mother tongue to save my life, neither can I converse without stuttering in my national language. I am linguistically dysfunctional but I still relate on more grounds than one to another human being than most of my peers or elders.

Shanti’s friend’s getting married. Oh, where’s she from? asks a relative of mine whose anonymity represents a vast majority of Indian relatives.
Mallu
Oh, what’s her name?
Again I would like to protect the anonymity of the friend in question, whose name was thoroughly dissected to study her caste, which in some closed minds sum up everything the individual stands for.
Oh, Izhava?
Oh what?
She is Izhava?
I don’t know, what is that?

Praise my parents who conveniently either forgot or respectfully withheld such trivial and unnecessary information during my upbringing.

How does it matter?!
Well it did, it did to most. The herd, the clan, the fraternity. The cast, the creed, the lack and abundance of opportunity.

Interestingly and amusingly, the Malayalam language sees variation every few hundred kilometers you head south (or north, now I am not taking credit for the birthplace of this language. So whichever direction the Cheras approached our land).
A preposition used or a choice of verb can indicate the caste and the area from which you hail from. Interesting revelations to a market researcher.

North Indians hate south Indians or vice versa. Negative feelings are always mutual.
Eastern people are called chinks, and viewed with an altogether different pair of spectacles. Kashmiris ? Oh yea the people who are living in turbulent conditions..yeah, them, what about them.
Do you think they should be given a different state?
NO…why…because then we will have to split into 29 different states…no way.
That’s all the substance we have in our argument? What about the people who had to leave everything their ancestors had built and disperse like sand falls from our hands to various parts of the country and the world?

We have equated every group to an attribute and the person in question loses his individuality and becomes an object of either ridicule or distrust.

That my friend, is why we are filled with so much apathy today. Because we cannot relate to anyone other than someone who is one of us to the n’th decimal point or someone who lived next door or we interacted with.
Someone who has a beating heart or someone who sees the stars just like you and me. Why can’t we all just lie down on a huge play ground and look up at the sky.