Same Difference?

Imagine this:
You wake up every morning, brush your teeth with Colgate Total. Then you spend fifteen minutes in the toilet doing your business while singing Hookah Bar to yourself. All of you. After that, you get ready and put on the same pair of pants and a standard black shirt and eat an omelet for breakfast. All of you. Then you drive to work at exactly 9:30 am driving evenly past every one else also driving to work in the same manner.Spend the day at work doing the exact same thing. All of you. Come back in the evening, watch the same India vs. Australia match on the TV, cheering for the Indian team, swearing at a 'gora cheater' at the 3rd ball of the 15th over every time. All of you. A dinner of aloo ki sabji, dal and rice, some more of the match, and sleep by 12. All of you. Every single one. Imagine, if this was our life- all of ours.

My insistence on including everyone in the above description isn't to focus on the banality of life. What I'm trying to point out is what the world would be like if all of us were the same, if all of us behaved in the same way, if all of us thought in the same way. Life would, I believe, be reduced to something like that of a daily soap opening sequence. Clearly, we don't all do the same things all the time. If we did, where would progress be? Where would relationships be? Where would we be?

Since we've established that our life wouldn't get too far if we were all the same, then why do we raise such a hue and cry over our differences? Be it a difference in race, religion, caste, colour, gender, occupation, financial status, language, education, clothes- anything; we don't accept differences. At the most, we tolerate them. If you really think about it, it is these very differences that enrich our lives, make them more meaningful and help us learn more. Without them, we become stagnant. So why create fights over the fact that you and I may be different?

Take this simple, but the most common, example. Parents from one religion sometimes become wary when their young child develops a closeness with a child from another religion. They go so far as to say "Aeni saatha bau na rehje"( Dont' stay with him too much) or "Aena ghare na jato" (Don't go to his house). Are they afraid that the two children will corrupt each other, fill each others' heads with communal nonsense? Are they? From personal experience I can say that that isn't true. My group of friends has a large amount of cultural and religious 'variety', and not once has that gotten in the way of our friendship. In fact, we've only learnt more from one another.

Similarly, diversity in other aspects of our life also leads to making every experience richer. If five tourists from Gujarat were to visit Karnataka, they will see it a certain way. However, if two Gujaratis, two Punjabis and one tourist from Assam were to go to the same place together, their entire perspective and learning from each other will change. Why can't we apply this to everyday life?

I'm not a preacher, nor am I a saint. All I'm trying to say here is that, as a society, we need to stop struggling against things that will make us better people. Stop looking for similarities, in stead, embrace the differences!


Image Credit: Embrace the Difference, universal symbol of acceptance.
P.S: Colgate Total has nothing to do with this post, neither does Hookah Bar. I don't own either of them.