Thursday, February 18, 2010

The flip side of ganging up

I got a forward saying that 'Congratulations to all Indians'. It sort of rang a bell in my nasty mind somewhere.

In the name of being an Indian, we mostly never would've moved a slug (just an exaggeration to say, we did nothing). But, why do we be congratulated for being an Indian?

Of course you can feel proud about being Indian, and that may be considered as personal view.

But just for no efforts of our own, we identify ourselves as something. This is what I call as 'gang up'.

No no.... this is not new.... it comes from the time we originated....

We gang up based on several parameters...
  • Place (Same village, same street, same hotel, Chennaites, Bangalorians, northy, southy, etc)
  • Nationality (Indian, pakistani, jewish, african, etc)
  • Religion (Sikh, Hindu, Muslim, --->No offense, but this is just my observation; I think only Qatar airways is religion based<---)
  • Caste (Mostly during marriage)
  • Sex (We can understand this... boys gang and girls gang.... natural)
  • Profession ( Engineers and Managers gang up separately, and of course completely different field professionals gang up separately)
  • Knowledge on a particular subject (For example cricket followers will gang up against non-followers)
  • Nomenclature (of course, different breeds of animals gang up with their kind; a bunch of humans shooing an elephant herd, etc)
  • Relationship (Family, relatives, etc. My family and my uncle family never fit with each other, kind of....)
  • People Color (white , black, etc. Oi, don't think I don't know other colors and that's why I used 'etc'. There are yellow people if you remember!)
  • Food (vegetarian / non-vegetarian)
  • Sexual habit (better consult wiki ;))
  • Language/State (Malayalee, kannadiga, tamilian, gulti, punjabi, etc)
  • Romantic meter level (play boy, useless guy, etc)
Well, the point is, we normally tend to gang up in one way or another. In particular, we will be part of multiple gangs at the same time. Based on context and situation, the overlay of relevant gangs at that situation will give us what we are.

It is good to gang up because we feel at home in that gang. But the thing is, when you pose the existence of a gang by identifying a gang and becoming part of it, the existence of another gang is inevitable.

So what? You may ask. By nature, gangs are nothing but small piece of a big chunk differentiated by certain parameter. That means, the other chunk doesn't sympathize with this chunk. That's why we could differentiate them in the first place.

Coming to the core of the matter..... Because of this gang up, at different levels, we have conflict in this world in different sizes and shapes.

Political, geographical, regional, linguistic, philosophical, religious, and innumerable conflicts. Some religions in this world want to outgrow other religions. Some countries want to outgrow other countries. People in some economical section want to outgrow other sections. Some philosophers want to outgrow other philosophies. Some business want to outgrow other business.

Even in technology world, there are gang ups based on preferences. For example, Linux followers and Windows users. There is a gang of people who use Firefox and others who use default browser.

When the whole world moved to Gmail, only Americans stayed with their stupid Hotmail. [Did you notice that I'm right now ganging up? You get the idea right? It creeps into your life before you realize :)]

When the entire world googles, China goggles at us in protest.

I'm really sorry. Because it was very interesting, I forgot to come back to the climax.

Well, we sort of understood that a gang up leads to the existence of another gang. So, what I'm saying is (idea!) we should gang up in a level where there is no possible another gang at the moment. But you never know.

For example, let's all gang up as Earthlings (creatures, objects on earth) forgetting the all other gangs (some of which I mentioned above). What if we discover aliens in future?!?

Tadaang! We should re-invent our gang! Instead of Earthlings, we should call us and aliens together as Galaxians or Milkywaytes or Univer'saalae's ;-)

God promise, I did not write this in high :)

I put a serious thought in a child's imagination.

Vola! Ciao!