My six years old niece Alisha attends a private school in London. It has a very diverse student profile, from different backgrounds, nationalities and faith.
Last week, during lunch in the school cafeteria, the children were served a choice of food, which included beef & mash. Now Alisha has no food restrictions or preferences. In fact, she loves her juicy burgers! So it was natural that she would pile her plate with the beef & mash, over the other food on offer.
Interestingly, and we later discovered this, she elected to sit at the end of the table where other kids chomping on the same food sat. Evidently, she had an instinct for the fact that the kids at the other end, largely of Asian origin and more specifically, Indian, were not eating beef.
As she ate her meal, she was suddenly subjected to heckling by her Indian classmates. The comments were rather strong and included chastising her for eating beef and that she was a bad Hindu.
Thankfully, Alisha is a chip off the old block. More importantly, she prefers to enjoy her meal rather than indulge in a senseless feud. She simply shushed the girls, asked them to eat their food and leave her alone and proceeded to finish her meal. The heckling continued but she chose to ignore it.
Later that day, she informed her father of the incident, who took it up the next day with the school principal, insisting that steps be taken to avoid children being singled out and ostracized on the grounds of religion. This is the UK, where political correctness has a slightly more elevated importance than it would in India, and the school principal readily agreed and acted accordingly.
Some of my observations –
- I recall a similar incident when I was a kid myself. We lived in a building that had a large population of Jains and chaste Hindus. The kids would leave me out of games in the park “because she eats salami and ham”. That was in 1977. Apparently, the malaise of prejudice that we pass on to our children remains widespread, prevalent and strong as ever.
- How can a six year old know what is a good Hindu and a bad Hindu? Why do families indoctrinate such finite beliefs in their child, particularly when they chose to live in cosmopolitan urban settings and aspire to belong to an international community? Is such decorum valid? Aren’t diet and devotion unrelated?
- Is it any surprise that respect and tolerance is a diminishing value and that communal divisiveness is an outcome of advocacy by society’s educated class?
- The kids who picked on Alisha were like her, just six years old. We can’t possibly blame them. But we certainly need to enlighten parents that they are responsible for what they impart. More critical, let’s hope as responsible adults they don’t discriminate on these grounds in their walks of life, social and professional.
Last I checked, Alisha has friends of a variety of nationalities. She loves learning about different cultures and enjoys sampling food from them. She’s as naughty as a six year old should be. She ducks doing homework and loves to play with her dog and rabbit. She is attentive to her grandparents, affectionate to her aunts and uncles and unconditionally in love with her parents.
To me, all this makes her a very good Hindu.
MA
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