Labels

Yesterday, I came across this post by RaysofSun where she talks about how people tend to label other people based on their origin, habits etc. Well, more than once, I have been pray of this habit and more than likely, I would like to say that, yes I do make generalizations. I understand what she is trying say but it is very necessary to understand Indians, specifically are societal (as I said earlier in one of my posts) and they like to belong to a certain group, be it a cultural, political, hobbyist or based on sports. But at the same time when we make a transition from India to United States, we get introduced to something radical or not necessarily imaginary concept called as ‘Individualism.’ Well, there is nothing wrong in subscribing to individualistic principles and disliking conformists – in essence you are being a non-conformist, and, I feel non-conformism is an antithesis in itself.

As a human being, everyone needs to identify themselves with something that is tangible. Those things could be the city that they live in, religion, and many other things, innovative minds will think about Harley Davidson cult. Based on these identities and our experiences with people from these groups, we form an image in our mind. Forming and labeling somebody without a priori experience would be a mistake – that will be prejudice.

But these images or so called labels help us to know or expect what we can get/expect from a certain individual. It is very easy to understand why we create images based on our experiences (again this is my understanding…quite naïve). For certain person from certain country behaved in bad certain, we start associating them with that label – country, much like all lemons are tangy and strawberries are red. Thus we tend to keep bad experiences in memory which may change our perception. So every time we see that person from a certain country we know what to expect. If that person behaves same way, we are not disappointed, but had been the case that we had good expectations in mind, certainly we would be disappointed.

Making generalizations is one thing and acting solely on those generalizations is something else. Reacting solely on prejudice rather than predilection is something that I detest.

I don’t think, we can treat each experience singularly as it happens and can’t label things, after all that’s what is called “learning.”