A home for vegetarians alone?
Updated On: 28 October, 2023 08:03 AM IST | Mumbai | Lindsay Pereira
There is an argument to be made for separate localities where people can eat only what they choose to
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The Indian Institute of Technology Bombay campus at Powai
There have been several instances reported over the past few weeks about vegetarians begging non-vegetarians to sit elsewhere, or eat elsewhere, or live elsewhere. There were complaints at IIT Bombay a while ago, for instance, about vegetarian students supposedly feeling nauseous around classmates who ate meat. Naturally, I believe these vegetarian IIT graduates will never move away from vegetarian India to countries like non-vegetarian America. It’s amusing how we still bother with these stories though, given how common they have become.
This recent bunch of reports caused a whole lot of predictable outrage online but didn’t bother me in the least. When I thought about why that was the case, I arrived at a simple conclusion: it was because I grew up believing that bigotry was somewhat normal. I know this may come as a shock to some people, but we should all have realised by now that everything we were taught in school about all Indians being ‘our brothers and sisters’ was a lie. It was just something put into Balbharati textbooks by people who didn’t obviously believe it themselves. The truth is, Indians are our brothers and sisters only if they are related to us, follow our religious beliefs, or speak the same language we do. If they don’t, they aren’t welcome in our homes, buildings, or localities. It’s why so many of us say nothing when our ‘brothers and sisters’ are lynched in public.
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