Prejudice

Prejudice means to dislike something or someone without any basis of logic or experience. We are all so comfortable with the innumerable prejudices we carry with us, that we fail to pay a thought to its correctness and fail to even question its existence in our minds, leave alone doing something about it.
At the root of this lies the fact that instead of identifying people by their behaviour or habits or statements and actions, we are more concerned with where they are from, what their surnames are and so many more details that help us categorise them in our minds. We are always giving shape to our prejudices by labelling people into categories by calling them 'mallu', 'gujju', 'bihari' etc. on linguistic bases, or other names on other bases. This constant 'othering' is our way of zeroing in on a person's individual identity. We don't remember our experience of interaction with a person as much as we know their caste labels, the places they come from and the languages they speak.
At a larger level, prejudice is given vent to in dangerous forms. Leaving aside the fact that films and other perpetrators of social prejudices portray particular communities in 'comic' roles to raise laughter among the audiences, one can see that prejudice lies at the root of all riots and probably even wars. All the -isms that are based on the principle of 'othering' - communalism, male chauvinism, jingoism, the omni-present casteism and the like, are all ugly manifestations of prejudice.
In spite of the countless ramblings of wise humanists and socialists who have been calling for an end to this malice, it has not been easy for people to change established notions based on linguistic, social, regional and gender-based categories. It needs immense resolve from our side and a conscious attempt to wash away such deeply-ingrained ideas from our minds. Let us attempt to do this.
deepesh