Kindness, Stereotyping and the Power of Questioning

My mother is not a woman of many lessons, but the one lesson she has always repeated almost my entire life is this – “If someone is feeling uncomfortable because of any of your actions or words directed at them, Stop Right There!” It took me years to realize that she was trying to teach me the most valuable lesson there is to humanity – Kindness.

In this lifetime, we interact with a multitude of people. Some of them are similar to us in many ways, but most of them are not. How then do we uphold our individuality even as we strive to be kind to the world around us?

We start by changing the direction of our words and actions. Often, as the ‘woke’ generation tries to question the social disgust there is, we tend to vilify the people involved, instead of the issue itself. We need to understand that it is not the person but the problem that has to be eradicated.

Sure, I am in no way trying to justify the heinous crimes committed by people all around us. But when we decide to raise our voices, let’s try to ‘hate the sin and not the sinner’. Because at the end of the day, our society is the way it is, because of the collective that ‘we the people’ are.

Each one of us is equally responsible in our own unique ways. But again, I do not want to politicize what I want to say. I don’t want to focus on the larger injustice that there is in the world today either.

Today, I want to focus on how we can make our world a better place. By simply changing how we choose to address the people and issues around us. I want to talk about the simplest of ways in which we often tend to be unkind to the people around us, by type-casting them, in other words, by ‘stereotyping’.

The number one thing that we need to understand about the phenomena of stereotyping is this - it is the most natural thing our human brain does. Let’s just say our brains were wired in a way to make us stereotype almost unconsciously. How is that?

Well, let’s understand what stereotypes are in the first place - Our tendency to group, for example, people belonging to a certain category to a framework wherein according to us, they will for sure, exhibit certain set of traits.

Ironically, people are not the only things we stereotype. We Stereotype EVERYTHING. For example, it is our tendency to stereotype all fruits as supposed to be sweet that doesn’t let us register that tomatoes too in fact, are fruits.

Now you may be saying this to yourself, ‘but I know I don’t stereotype’. For you my friend, picture this, exams are approaching, two students are discussing about their worries related to a said exam, person A says to person B who according to past academic records has scored better, “Bhai, tune toh sab pada hi hoga!” (“You must have studied everything I am sure)

That, my dear friend, is stereotyping. I like to define stereotyping in a simpler term, “assumption”. It is often our assumptions about how said person will behave that makes us say things to them. More often than not, these assumptions lead to really unkind words.

Sure, understanding what a person is like is important for every conversation. But assuming how they are is highly questionable. I am sure now you will be able to recall countless examples where people have said unkind things to you based on their evidence-less assumption.

Now the question is, how then do we stop ourselves from running our conversations on auto-pilot? How then do we counter our brain’s natural tendency to stereotype, that is to assume? We do the one thing that makes us the most human – We Question.

Coming back to our example, instead of blurting out “Bhai tune toh sab pada hi hoga!”, if person A were to ask, “Bhai tune sab pad liya kya?” (Did you study everything?). That mere statement shows a huge amount of care and consideration.

Instead of making assumptions, if we were to ask more questions, I bet our conversations will become more kind and fulfilling. I remember this once, a well-meaning acquaintance saying to my cancer-stricken aunt, “Aapko toh bahot dard ho raha hoga na!” (You must be in a lot of pain!) Had she simply asked my aunt if she was in pain, I am sure she would have felt much better, knowing that people truly cared about what she felt.

My only prayer for the world around us is this- that we learn to Ask before We Assume and Question before We Conclude.