Long before Facebook introduced the tag application we earthlings practiced it on earth. I think tagging people comes naturally to human beings. We tag people by the clothes they wear, places they visit, friends they keep; the way they appear – the list is endless. For example, long back I was questioned by a senior at work, “You girls need to know the market where we sell. How will you know all of this if you travel in AC cars?” Tagged - Upmarket chick, with no knowledge of local Delhi markets. The mall type.
As usual I lost my cool, how can anyone tag me and my past experiences because of my present. The gentleman had no idea that in the initial days of my career I had travelled by locals in Mumbai and the dreaded public buses in Delhi. And market understanding needs market visits and not “feeling up sessions” in Delhi buses.
I faced a similar situation again. I was chatting with someone on the potential of the smaller cities of India, when suddenly the woman looked up and said, “But what would you know about smaller cities of India? Look at you all dressed up in trousers and nails manicured!” Tagged - Typical Delhite, born and bought up in a metro and has never been out of here.
I stopped short of slapping the woman, lest I be thrown out of my job for violence at workplace. Somehow I managed to shift my focus from physical violence and ways I could torture the preposterous woman sitting in front me and asked her, “And what makes you think I wouldn’t know of the smaller cities of India?” Pat she replied, “Well you look born and bought up in Delhi (see I was right). Again I detangled myself from the thought of pulling her hair apart and said, “Why would you say so?” The lady said, “Well you wear trousers, paint your nails and speak English?” Oh’ how myopic people are! Here my humor quotient came into play and I asked her, “Why don’t you tell me about which towns you are talking about, let’s see if I know of them or not?” She shot, “Darbhanga, Ichapuram, Berhampur, Rajamundhry, Rajpura and Sompeta are some of our focus towns and am sure you should be able to figure out our focus states now"(laced with deadly sarcasm). I couldn’t help but smile gleefully at that point and tell her, “When they told us in school don’t judge a book by its cover they were very right. And to her confused face, I replied, “You focus is clearly Bihar (Darbhanga), Orissa (Ichapuram, Berhampur) Punjab (Rajpura) and Andhra (Rajamundhry & Sompeta).” She was shell-shocked and I had my pound of flesh…obviously without a drop of blood in the vicinity.
I would say she was slightly unlucky because of the towns she chose, because I was born in Bihar, belong to Orissa, have lived near Punjab and on our yearly travels to Orissa passed Andhra and its cities some zillion times :). Had she named some towns from Chhattisgarh or Himachal Pradesh she would have definitely proved her point of “well dressed” people not knowing small towns of India.
Anyhow, the whole point of this post was definitely not to tom-tom my geographical knowledge of India (which is pretty good and am proud of that) but just to say how easily people tag us (and we tag people). Just take a look at the list:
- Women who smoke and drink are easily available (ugghhhh)
- Women who choose to keep their maiden names after marriage don’t love their husbands
- Men who go to beauty salon are vain
- Men who listen to their wives are hen-pecked (and those who don’t are brutes)!
- Mothers who work and leave their babies behind are ruining their childhood
- Parents of the girl who stay with her for too long after her marriage are inviting trouble (this one is the worst)!
We often tend to typecast people, classify them, put them in boxes and store them in our mind with a tag. And that’s where the tag originated….in the human mind eons back!