Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Holier than thou?

I wanna do a post on Racism. Please leave your comments on the following :

- Whether you believe that North Indians look down upon South Indians as second class citizens, and ridicule them. (I don not wish to generalize here, but plain english does not allow otherwise)

- Would you make a distinction on caste/creed? Explain why.


I have some pretty strong beliefs myself, and would like to know what you guys think about it. So please feel free to comment, and try and leave your name back, so I can credit it to you in the original post.

13 comments:

Unknown said...

Well i do not believe that all north indians ridicule and criticize south indians...however there is always a certain section of society that believes they are the best and look down upon other factions. South Indians are generally more introverted and less pompous as north indians (my opinion) and this is the root cause of all these opinions...However most of us would agree that this feeling of discrimination exists only in a small minority of ppl.

Anonymous said...

people act like that bcoz of some of the below reasons.

1) They get cheated almost everywhere coz they are unable to communicate in local language(shops and autos etc).
2) In any issue localites support thier own people over non-localites. Even if they know that the localite is guilty.
3) Even police will ignore most of the times non-localites.
4) Localites won't talk to them unless it is unavoidalble.
5) Localites will try to warn them that the place is not thier home and its not easy to do all things they used to do at thier place.
2) They may be pissed with the weather conditions there.

I think who blames people of north india/south india have faced any of the above problems.

Akshay said...

- Whether you believe that North Indians look down upon South Indians as second class citizens, and ridicule them. (I don not wish to generalize here, but plain english does not allow otherwise)

I am really not sure of this but do believe that for certain pockets of the population it is true either way. I have seen lot of south indian's ridiculing the people from the north too and vice versa. Probably the proportion of this happening is more significant as indicated by you.


- Would you make a distinction on caste/creed? Explain why.

I dont, have never done it will never do that. I believe all of us follow and do what we want to.

Anonymous said...

1) I dont think the North Indians look down upon south Indians and criticize them. For Somethings like the Spoken English of south Indians, may be some are ridiculed.
2) I would not make a distinction based on caste / creed. In Olden days, this was primarily made based on the occupation of the people and their cleanliness. But even now, some people feel that they are superior just because they belong to a so called "upper caste". To remove such feelings from our future generations is in our hands. We need to put sincere effort for the same.

On the lighter side, may be we should have something like a "Validity period" for the caste. :-) Every few years, people will be re-classified based on their jobs!!! All software engineers would then belong to same caste ;-)

Anonymous said...

Adding to Pavithra's points, long long ago all these so called castes (in hinduism) we labelled based upon the kind of job a person was doing.
For ex:
Brahmin-> pooja, learning/preaching vedas and stuff.
Vishya-> business, trading.
SC->cleaning shit, moving corpse.
ST->tribal people.

Since all the people belonging to various castes have undergone a radical change over a period of time, its time for us to do away with this "caste" classification. But the Government is trying to carry forward this by making people to specify caste in application forms, admission forms and stuff..

Anonymous said...

I agree with akshay on the vice versa part..
Sometimes i have seen south indians treat or think of north indians as beneath themselves.
Also generalizing the fact that north indians as a community look down upon south indians would be unfair. :)
Also what about north indians who have been born and brought up in south india and speak the local language just as well as the localites? :)

Vinayak said...

@ Anon
Thanks for the explanation :)

It would be great if you could give your OPINION on racism.

@ Others
Thanks for responding. Please forward the link to those who would be keen on commenting.

Anonymous said...

I have seen and experienced the prejudice against south Indians by north Indians and I believe there are several reasons to it. First of all there is a huge amount of ignorance and lack of knowledge. The north Indians doesn't completely understand the southern culture and the only idea they have comes mostly from entertainment (i.e bolloywood). I do believe with anoop's point that south Indians are more introverted but I don't consider that as a weakness. Most south Indians are attached to their cultural and religious roots whereas north indians tend to be more modernized and this also creates a gap between the north indians and south indians. The only way to eliminate this discrimination is through continuous achievement and success by south indians in all fields of life.

Atul

Harsha said...

Not all north indians, but some of them do. And yeah, they ridicule south indians a lot, sometimes with the names like "madrasi" and sometimes with the accent.

Aparna S Mallya said...

I think it's high time we realised the futility of caste systems. Nowadays people from all walks of life have the intelligence and opportunities to surpass what their 'caste' labels them to achieve.(ref :anon)

Anonymous said...

I wouldn't generally make a distinction on the basis of caste/creed, however, i would definitely hold a grudge against a person (any person at all- irrespective of caste and creed) who would take the job or university seat that rightfully (on merit basis) should have been mine. i hence beleive that reservations do not uplift but further increase the social divide.

however, i would agree with reservations on purely financial status .

Scoot said...

hmmm interesting .go ahead write one on it.I absolutely do not believe in any form of segregation or caste system.

Praveen Damodhar said...

I dont think Northies look down on southies.... Still they comment a lot on our acent and our movies too...(Being in the hostel, we get hilarious comments on senti n flamboyantly coloured song sequences in movies here..).. Although, we too laugh with them,Still we feel somewht bad..


Abt, caste distinctions, I have nothing to say.. It has become a thing of the past..Only thing wich rekindles the fire are these reservations issues with some parties gainin political mlieage out of it..