‘Why can’t people think? Do they not have a mind of their own?’

These were questions raised by the group of students who are a part of the human rights course at South City International School in response to discussion on mindsets and bias.

On the face of it, simple and straightforward questions.

We started class that morning by reading a passage from Sudhanva Deshpande’s writing about the Gujarat riots of 2003. A year that witnessed a pogrom based on religion differences. After we had read it, I asked them if they had experienced any religious bias (more specifically, the Hindu- Muslim bias) in their personal lives. A few hands went up.

One of the students narrated an incident, which had occurred during a game of football. When he was about to chastise one of his friends who was playing an unnecessarily rough game, the response from some of the others was ‘ let it be, he is Muslim, he will play that way.’

Another student narrated an incident where he was directing a play and another student approached him with a request to audition for a role in the play. The following day however, the student backed out from the audition because he was told by his grandmother not to audition for the role of a Muslim. The student who narrated this incident said that he wasn’t able to react to this simply because he was too shocked. When he met the other student’s grandmother after the play, he was ‘cold’ in his behaviour towards her, because as he said, she ‘deserved’ it.

Two points immediately stood out to me. One was the student’s inability to react to the situation, and also the words he used to describe his reaction to meeting the lady after the play—‘ cold’ and ‘deserved’. I asked the students to think about the two points. Would they, faced with a similar situation, be able to react? A few of them said no. And some said yes. They would have been able to take a stand immediately.

I then shared an experience similar in nature, that I had faced while travelling in a public bus. I had not been able to react, when I could have very easily done so. While I empathized with the feeling of not being able to react to a situation that is very clearly wrong, I also then thought about my role in helping, to a certain degree, perpetuate a deeply ingrained bias. The fact that the student’s reaction was cold was also, to some extent, understandable, although some of them did not agree that she ‘deserved’ it.

A discussion about the possible circumstances in which the grandmother might have grown up in and how circumstances shape mindsets followed. We cannot know what she might have experienced growing up, or perhaps even a few days before. Formative years play a huge role in deciding our mindsets. This led to the question of how one can lose the ability to make decisions of our own.

This morning’s discussion led me to think about my own mindsets. I sometimes don’t stop to think about circumstances. The fact that situations cannot always be defined as right or wrong. Black or white.

Questioning mindsets is definitely the need of the hour. But defining people according to their mindset or beliefs is perhaps something we should look at critically.

–Paroma Sengupta