It’s no fun being at the receiving end of discrimination.
MONICA FERNANDES
“Everything can be taken from a man but … the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way” -Dr. Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning.
Psychiatrist, Dr. Viktor Frankl may have been one of many Jewish prisoners in a Nazi concentration camp. The inmates were stripped of their clothes, of their dignity. They were tortured and compelled to do hard labour but they could not be stripped of their individuality. The Nazis tried to de-humanise their hapless captives but could not break their spirit.
The term ‘migrants’, to me, is derogatory. It conjures up an image of bottles being manufactured on an assembly line. Every bottle must conform to a laid down standard or out it goes into the trash heap. Are human beings assembly line products? Are we clones of each other? Do all the people in the same economic or social strata live in an identical fashion?
The answer is an emphatic NO. God has created each of us in a different mould. It is mind boggling to realize that no two individuals in a world with billions of inhabitants have exactly the same faces, not even identical twins. To illustrate our individuality further, the left side of any face varies in minor ways from the right side. We differ in shape, colour and height. There are optimists, pessimists and those somewhere in the middle. Some are strong while others are weak. A loving God values each of us regardless as persons with a free will and a choice on how to react to similar outward circumstances. We throw some of our fellow temporary passengers on earth into the dustbin of Rejection.
The term ‘migrants’ has a one-up, one-down; “I am superior, you are inferior” connotation. We should guard against thinking of those who are less privileged than us, because they are less educated or poorer, as belonging to ‘the migrants’, to an assembly line of human beings. Many of us have made our home in Mumbai though our ancestors hailed from another part of the country. So technically we too are ‘migrants’!
A couple would come to my doorstep selling fruits. They were very proud to inform me that though they were illiterate, by dint of hard work, they educated their three sons who are now teachers in the village. In contrast, my part time help Jyoti had a husband who wasted her hard earned earnings on liquor and would regularly beat up his family. Those unfortunates trudging hundreds of miles to their village were contributing members of society – plumbers, electricians, construction workers and not faceless human beings. It was a tragedy of gigantic proportions as wave after wave of human beings with meager belongings, some carrying their tiny tots, braved the hot sun because they had lost their jobs during the pandemic.
Why are we wary of those different from us? This is evident from our remarks such as, “Mark hails from X state. The saying goes that you should trust a snake but not someone who comes from X.” Needless X does not come from the State our ancestors come from. This displays a small minded, bigoted attitude.
Mother Teresa and Baba Amte took pity on lepers, the sick, the destitute and the dying – those lovingly crafted by God but rejected by their own. These people were in need of help, medicine, kind words and above all, love to restore their dignity.
Part of our attitude is that we are wary of those different from us and look at them with suspicion. No one lives in my husband’s ancestral house in Saligao, Goa. Family members stay in the house off and on. It has been the target of two burglary attempts since the pandemic began. Darshan, a local Goan, is my regular taxi driver during my stay. I was recently in Goa and asked him, “Who do you think is targeting empty houses? Are they the locals or those who have come from outside the State for jobs?” He was horrified that I could even think the locals could be responsible. “No, Madam, no! Not the locals. Definitely the migrants”, stated the budding Sherlock Holmes.
It’s no fun being at the receiving end of discrimination. For instance, there was a time when society just could not accept that women could become qualified professionals like doctors, lawyers and chartered accountants. It was an uphill task for these women to prove otherwise.
History has shown groups of self serving men and women treating people differently. They may appear to succeed in the short run but eventually lose out. Stalin’s totalitarian regime in Russia in the 1940’s arrested many men and forced them to do hard labour in the forbidding Siberian terrain. One such person was Alexander Solzhenitsyn, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. His book ‘One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovic’ illustrates that while all the prisoners seem identical during their daily trudge over snow covered terrain, they were individuals with a common purpose, viz. their own survival and that of the group. There was the expert mason, Ivan Denisovic also called Sukhov, the respected team leader Tiurin, hardworking Buinovsky and lazy Fetiukov.
We do not realize it but our labeling a large group of people by calling them ‘migrants’ is discriminatory. Our mindset can only change when we stop pigeon holing an entire group of people into categories.
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