Editorial: Open Up, Don’t Hunker Down

Identity, as in the perceptions of the outside, is a touchy issue among the marginalized communities. The ill-informed clichés, the pedantic, and thus offensive, generalizations remain sore points for the offended communities and we live in a region that has lived with such broad-brush impoliteness for ever since we started interacting with the plains. And the brush paints both ways, one may add here. While it is easy to take affront and fine to draft a fresh introduction to correct the perceptions, it is definitely not okay to allow the chip on the shoulder to burden heavier than is healthy. The more this perceived slight is allowed to fester, the more it diverts energy from pursuits that take communities forward. One refers to a “perceived slight” here because the clichés that hurt are products of ignorance and one should not really allow ignorance in others to justify withdrawals into cocoons by the othered. And defensive shells are not the best habitations to plan ahead from because they keep thoughts and ideas rooted in a past that has lost its relevance for everyone except those who swoon in its fermented confusion. Also, while so enclosed, one fails to recognize changes elsewhere. But it is important that the ignorance which has degenerated into disdain, mutual suspicion and distasteful stereotyping is lifted. The exodus of people from the North East which embarrassed the country the past week, the continuing parochialism everywhere in the country, the reprehensible attempts at justifying what happened at Kokrajhar and continues to recur often in places at geographical extremes like Mumbai and Assam will repeat unless this country makes some earnest efforts at celebrating its much-vaunted diversity. As this section recently commented, 65 years as one nation and the citizens still don’t behave as One People. The students provide the best opportunity to build the bridges which can span the chasms of mutual ignorance which feeds insularity among us. A simple and easily achieved course would be for the community/ state representative organisations of the students to become mediums which link communities, not strive to make them self contained and self conscious. Take the freshers’ welcome parties for instance. Instead of each community, each state or region hosting a welcome party for its own kind, they should use the funds to introduce the freshers to ‘others’ in the student community. Host the parties for ‘your own’ but invite guests from all other groups. Make celebrations the medium to proffer more congenial introductions and strike new friendships. Use the organisations to speak more often about the concerns of other groups and engage more earnestly in issues and challenges which face other communities. This openness is possible only with the idealism of youth, but is currently being stifled because student groups remain obsessively insular.